We don't define decadence because we don't want to establish it as a concept without being able to pin blame.
That might sound weird or too reductive, but think about what decadence is in popular conception: the populace has high expectations and takes peace and prosperity for granted, the people in power are gaming the system, the engagement and sense of shared stakes is evaporating, and so on. You can't talk about these things without an angle. Are we saying that people can have it too good? Horrifying conclusions you can draw from that. Are we saying that corrupt and shiftless leadership is to blame? Better, but a fair bit of writing about leadership during periods of decadence centers on leaders being milquetoast and not changing enough, so you can end up endorsing leaders who are cruel and overbearing if you don't frame it right. Shared stakes? Sounds like nationalism, driving conflict.
Decadence is real. The catch 22 is that a specific definition for it is really hard to formulate and impossible in politically turbulent times, like while you're in the decadent culture.
If you think Rome in 476ad and Rome in 100ad would have had a similar response to tribal invasions, I guess you could deny decadence had anything to do with it. But I doubt it would work. At the very least, you could say that Rome had a more aggressive and cohesive identity in the earlier period, and then you have to work through what that means. Citizens should have rallied behind the leadership to prevent any incursion, but is it the citizens or the leadership that failed, or became complacent?
Expectations can still factor into it, and so can corrupt leaders, operating in a different kind of corruption. Yes, it's complex. We research complex historical phenomena all the time, with the usual result being oversimplified narratives. But there are a few topics, like this or the definition of feudalism or more recently the decision to drop the bombs on Japan (thank you Chris Nolan) which bring up a bunch of ire and elude honest conversation. It's a problem of historiography, and the subject is not popular to tackle. There are trends, and decadence doesn't fit the current ones.
That's exactly why it would be beneficial to have a definition for what decadence is. I honestly don't know how to measure or define the cultural differences over this span of time, and no one else does either. The more detail you go into, the harder it is: economics could be part of it, as cliometrics is incredibly difficult, I know. The legitimacy of "fixed" expectations would likely be part of it, too: that revolves around prevailing narratives and how people respond to violations of social norms, which would almost certainly be impossible to measure. Tricky stuff.
But I think you're asking for more proof than should be necessary, then begging a question to make it seem like I'm making the leap here. That's not right. The most basic history of Rome indicates clearly that Rome didn't mobilize to save the empire from the Germanic tribes in 476, where it threw thousands upon thousands of men after victory in the Punic Wars, where the stakes were less immediate. There IS a difference.
And we don't really seem to want to talk about it. Many theories have been put forth, and some of the factors at work probably should be included in a good quality definition of decadence. But discussions of the fall of Rome mostly push lots of small, diffuse reasons why it happened, including now climate change and immigration, nothing more holistic. I think there's a reason for that, and it isn't because decadence doesn't exist.
Rome's final years are characterized by barrack emperors and economic decline. It faired best when its emperors got into power through (fairly) peaceful inheritance.
I like you bringing up the punic wars, but you omit that a substantial portion of Italy defected to Hanibal during the invasion. Rome's history is full of delicate coalition building.
Finally, any claim about the West's decline that does not adress the East's future golden age and 1000 year long lifespan is unconvincing to me.
Yeah I found that passage a little obnoxious honestly. Especially "I’m not enough of a historian to know whether everyone was wrong until 476 AD ..." , which kind of implies he is enough of a historian to take as given that Western Rome collapsed due to decadence.
Sure, Edward Gibbon supported it, and media like Gladiator have cemented it in the public imagination—but dismissing decadence and moral decay as the primary cause of the fall of Rome isn’t some fringe lefty revisionism. It’s the mainstream scholarly view.
There's something weirdly circular that Gibbon (among others) reads Roman conservatives and early Christians that Rome was morally bankrupt, concludes then that this must be related to the decline, the meme spreads, then many modern conservatives use Rome as a key exemplar/evidence of the dangers of moral decay.
Sir, we have a new requirement for your substack. All posts, no matter the topic, must have adorable kid pictures liberally interspersed between paragraphs.
Oh God, no. Interesting blogs go all to hell when baby-mad posters start splicing in pictures of their young'uns between talking about whatever their ostensible subject is. If Scott wants to talk about his personal life, fine, but I hope he'll try to keep it in separate posts, apart from the policy/history/philosophy/commentary stuff that drew many of us here. And sure, I accept that sometimes a bright line can't be drawn, as in the case of this post.
We will have to fight a duel to resolve this disagreement then, because my philosophy about internet commentary adheres to the ancient school of Babies Are Awesome And Important Enough To Intrude On Everything-ism.
These are our virtual godchildren, we have a legitimate interest in how cute, smart, advanced, wonderful and amazing they are and having a record of same 😁
Seconding this. I don't mind the personal posts, they're still interesting, but baby pictures are about as disruptive as popup ads; every one of them yanks me out of the essay's flow because I have to suppress Suddenly Squick.
We're all hardwired to think our kids are just the most beautiful, wonderful things. That causes parents to WAY overshare to the point it becomes annoying. Kid pics are fine in essays related to children, but please don't put them everywhere.
It doesn't have to be YOUR kids, I'm hardwired to think that almost everyone's kids are sufficiently wonderful that I want others to celebrate them, and to share in their celebration.
If you make a new post on (https://voltairesviceroy.substack.com/) that has incisive commentary AND adorable pictures of your (or any) wonderful kids I will happily subscribe.
Interesting to finally reach the bottom and see this comment at the top. I removed the baby pictures as I went using uBlock's element blocker (the one under the table was ok though).
I thought Caplan's book was pretty terrible because the vast majority of it was "here's another twin study saying nothing you do makes a difference". But that's not motivation to have more kids! He almost never actually addresses the actual title of his book!
As far as I could tell his actual reason boils down to "I've heard being a grandparent is pretty great so you should have more kids to maximise your grandparenting".
Felt like a complete failure of a mismatch between title and actual contents.
I thought his argument was something like: suppose you are currently on the fence about having another kid, because kids are fun and cute but also a lot of work. Twin studies show that most of the work doesn't matter. Therefore, you can do less work than you think, and that should push you off the fence into having the kid.
I agree this doesn't work if you're not on the fence for that specific reason.
That's what I meant by mismatch between title & contents. Imagine you bought a book titled "Reasons to Own Lots of Cars" and all the book actually had inside was tricks to get a 20% discount on buying cars. You'd think, "you haven't actually given me positive reasons to own lots of cars, maybe you should have titled your book 'If you want to buy lots of cars, here's how to get them cheaper'".
In more economist terms: Caplan's cover says he will address the demand-side but his book is actually about the supply-side. What's more he assumes demand is reasonably elastic but there are reasons to be skeptical of that. Studies show lottery winners (and other exogenous wealth shocks like an inheritance) don't have more kids, despite claiming cost was the reason they didn't have more kids. Millionaires don't have more kids than hundred-thousand-aires. Billionaires (other than Elon Musk) don't have more kids than millionaires.
That makes sense, although I think Cremieux has written about some recent research suggesting that child subsidies do have a small (on an individual level) but significant (on a social level) effect on fertility.
See my comment above, but: You CANNOT "do less work" for a newborn/infant/toddler, unless you enjoy the "WAAAAHHHHH" of a neglected, hungry, wet infant in the background (or unless you outsource most of the hands-on care to said infant's eight-year-old sister, I guess).
I think you can in some cases. For example when our kid was around 1 year old we gave up on "sleep training" and just let them sleep in our bed. Ended up being way easier, and honestly, I think it has made them better adjusted. I think the whole "toddlers must sleep alone" thing is a WEIRD western imposition.
My husband read this book and the idea that stuck with him was "think about how many kids you want at age 60", that is, don't overrate the infancy years and discount the much more plentiful adult children years. I think people really do make this mistake too often so that idea was worth $4 on thriftbooks. Anyway now we have four kids.
The problem is that you only have the kids at age 60 if they don't hate you, and doing whatever makes your life most appealing might make your kids hate you.
Is there a reason to expect your children hating you is particularly correlated with a more hands-off parenting style? I tried to look around and didn't find much compelling data on this question in any direction (especially about how your children will view your relationship as adults), but I also didn't look that hard.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of "I hate my parents" cases seem to come from:
1) Very high expectations/standards on the part of parents
2) Very strict/authoritarian parents
3) Some sort of strong ideological or belief difference (liberal kids and conservative parents as well as atheist kids and ultra-religious parents being the biggest ones), typically coupled with a refusal on the part of one side or both to 'agree to disagree'.
None of these seem strongly linked to a hands-off parenting style, and I would argue #2 is probably inversely related.
The absolute worst case "My parents are very neglectful" stories I've heard are the only ones that seem to spark hatred, and go far beyond 'chill out and parent like someone from the 50s' and more 'active disregard for the child's continued existence'.
Doing whatever makes your life most appealing isn't necessarily the same as hands-off.
Things which make your life more appealing might include:
- Trips to destinations you are interested in and the children are not, even if they involve extensive transit time or more of a culture clash for the children than for you.
- Not changing plans when kids are sick.
- Pushing children to not make a fuss about your friends visiting, even if your friends insist on touching the children in ways they don't like / bringing kids or animals who are obnoxious to your children / etc.
- Visibly buying expensive luxuries for yourself and skimping on things that dramatically affect your children's lives.
These behaviors can be pretty memorable to kids.
I will conclude by saying that, if you have the money to routinely go on overseas vacations, you have the money to make sure that your child has somewhere to store medications whose instructions say to keep between 15-30°C.
"you have the money to make sure that your child has somewhere to store medications whose instructions say to keep between 15-30°C" this seems oddly specific and I'm sorry it happened to you or someone close to you.
That said,
"Visibly buying expensive luxuries for yourself and skimping on things that dramatically affect your children's lives"
seems the only really egregious one and I'd say it's orthogonal to hands off parenting. Maybe correlated but bc of a third underlying factor (the parents' coscientiousness), there is no reason why one needs to be neglectful when being off-hands.
I'd add that within limits, both
"Trips to destinations you are interested in and the children are not, even if they involve extensive transit time or more of a culture clash for the children than for you"
and
"Pushing children to not make a fuss about your friends visiting, even if your friends insist on touching the children in ways they don't like / bringing kids or animals who are obnoxious to your children / etc"
are good for the children and usually fondly remember when they grow up. I don't think I ever met an adult who was like "god I really hated how much my parents always made me visit museums and old towns". It's usually seen like one of those things good parents are *supposed* to do, for the child's benefit.
I haven't read the book, but one of the themes I remember Caplan hitting pretty hard on his blog about parenting around the time he wrote is was the three outcomes where parenting style (within a window where the parents are neither neglectful nor abusive) did seem to make a difference were:
1. Parent's happiness during the kid's childhood
2. Kid's happiness during their own childhood
3. Quality of their later relationship as adults.
I don't remember details, but I'm pretty sure Caplan's conclusion on all three points was that they cut in favor of his parenting style. IIRC, he was contrasting his style with that described and advocated in Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (also published in 2011), and Caplan's take was that his relatively hands-off and permissive parenting style was a lot more pleasant in the moment for both parent and child, laid the groundwork for a better relationship with them as adults, and made little or no difference to other life outcomes compared to Chua's strict and hard-driving style.
But do his kids play violin well? Did they graduate Yale? It really depends what life outcomes we are choosing to measure, doesn't it? The Sudbury Valley school did a 20-year retrospective, and found that most of their graduates were not working white collar jobs. They said this was okay, because they are aiming to maximize happiness, not income. But at least one interviewed graduate was stressed because being a line-cook was not conducive to having a family. Sure, he was doing what he loved, but depending how you measure, he was not necessarily happier for it.
Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld are both law professors at Yale. I'm guessing that children of couples in similar situations have a pretty good baseline of outcomes in terms of academic achievement and early career success through combinations of heritable traits, culture, and children benefitting from their parents' personal and professional networks.
Bryan Caplan is an econ professor at UVA and I think his wife Corina is a lawyer at Freddie Mac. This parenting combo also seems like it would be correlated with a high base rate of academic and early career success regardless of parenting style, but not quite as a large an advantage as Chua and Rubenfeld's situation.
Caplan's children are also quite a bit younger than Chua's. His two oldest children are currently undergraduates, I think. At least he posted something in 2021 about them both being accepted to Vanderbilt with full merit scholarships. If they finish their degrees in four years, that would have them graduating this summer.
Yes, I think we can all agree that having two college professors as parents leads to better outcomes, regardless. The question is whether either methodology can be generalized successfully to the public at all socioeconomic strata, and which works better. I think there's something to be said about the fact that many rising middle class parents choose the more intensive version, perhaps thinking of their own upbringing and concluding that letting kids run free doesn't always lead to the most tangible or measurable results.
The benefits of free ranging are generally less tangible or measurable. My question about "who plays violin" was specifically pointing to a highly measurable achievement, one that often results from a more intensive parenting rather than a free-ranging one.
One thing to recall is that Professor Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is intentionally quite funny and self-satirical. It's less intended as a self-help book than as an entertaining look at a growing segment of American elites (or of the next generation of American elites): East Asian tiger parents. As an upper middle class Southern Californian, I was familiar with the milieu before the book came out, but now I have a verb "Tiger-mothering" to explain what I'm talking about to others.
Thanks for adding that. I haven't read it and most of what I know of it is filtered through Caplan. If he talked about it being self-satirical, it failed to stick in my memory.
She was definitely mocking herself. At one point, she's upset to find that their dog is too dumb to become "accomplished". Her conclusion is that she could have chilled out significantly and had just as good results. But considering that her level of chill at the start is in the deep red, it's not entirely clear what she considers the optimal level of chill (it could still be significantly less chill than the average helicopter mom).
I'm in the middle of it now, and it's incredible depressing and flippant. Literally nothing you do will ever matter. Genetic pre-determimation is the *only* factor in child development. If you're an alcoholic your kid will be one too, so don't bother trying to teach them otherwise. If you and your partner are Green New Deal Democrats you don't need to bother teaching your kid your morals, they'll turn out just like you regardless of what you do because natural selection predestined your genetic code to have specific beliefs about American corporate tax rates. Nothing matters, so don't bother giving a half a shit beyond your own personal happiness.
It's like listening to Sam Harris talk about how free will doesn't exist and no one has ever made a decision in their lives - everything is predetermined. You're entire being is nothing but a mechanical input-output machine that neither you nor your parents nor anyone else has any control over. It's obviously false and insufferable to listen to. I guess I'll keep listening, though, because I'm destined to and nothing matters anyway.
Have absolutely overrated the infancy years and decided to have fewer kids. When I hit 8 years without sleeping through the night, 8 years without making it to the gym consistently, over the course of 3 kids... well, those infancy years accumulate, you know? I don't know what those kids will be like when I'm 60. They may end up being a total waste of my time and life force. Better to focus on helping these turn out okay and forget the unborn ones.
Caplan says: it is like "an offer of a 20%-discount coupon for chocolate: Sure, for customers who don't want any chocolate: no use." - But the title is SRTHmoreKIDS. So, clearly not for those not into any.
That is absolutely true. As for me, it's already too late (older son born when I was 35). But by George, that when *their* time comes, they'll have every possible help to have *their* children soon. Or sooner than that.
Yeah I mean it wasn't a simple narrative but a long list of reasons. I thought the twin studies were a key framing for two key arguments. One was parents should put in less work because of twin studies, but the other was if you care about having children with very successful material outcomes, as the imagined tiger mom might, then it still makes more sense to have more kids for more genetic dice instead of over parenting one. I think the second one is weak since most parents aren't that hardcore about child success, but it does push against the vibe of working super hard to make your kid successful.
Louise Perry of the "Maiden Mother Matriarch" podcast recently had demographer Lyman Stone on to discuss the fertility crisis, and child raising in general. The discussion at the beginning was largely Stone explaining the discrepancies and nuances in the various "Time spent on childcare" datasets and is well worth a listen. He mostly discussed the primary vs secondary childcare issue, but his main thrust was about child-as-subject childcare (which has increased) and child-accompanying-adults childcare (which he think as declined).
The other major point he discusses which I found very interesting was co-childcare (so, other parents or friends looking after your kids) and playdates, which both hugely help with the burden of childcare (as kids with other kids can entertain themselves). Whole pod worth a listen but the first 20 minutes or so are most relevant to the questions Scott raised here.
Well, everyone who attempts to bring it up ends up eaten alive by a swarm of angry older brothers/sisters who loathed having to take care of their younger siblings.
But I see that attitude a lot on the internet, to an extent that I got an impression that this turned into the same sort of taboo letting your children roam freely is.
I have 4 younger siblings and I loved spending time with them as a child and as a teen, up until I moved out of my parents house to go to Uni. But also I had a stay-at-home mom (not at all common), and my oldest sibling is only a year and a half younger than me, so it's not like I had to put in that much work.
I hear a lot about the oldest child ending up having to do basically all the housework and childcare on their own, and while I have no doubts some of the reports are exaggerated, some must be true. I imagine that it gets especially bad when the family has other problems (really poor, one parent missing, alcoholism/drug use in parents, etc etc).
And that's where the hostility to the idea comes from, probably?
>Well, everyone who attempts to bring it up ends up eaten alive by a swarm of angry older brothers/sisters who loathed having to take care of their younger siblings.
Older brother here. It didn't bother me. I would invent games for us to play together.
Yeah, this. I grew up in a big family, and am planning to have a big family, so was definitely counting on this effect (as well as nannies, maids, etc).
I'd personally bet on it being something like a Reddit / ACX split, where Reddit strongly selects for less successful, more resentful, more online people.
If you read Sarah Hrdy's Mothers and Others, alloparenting has been a big deal for literally our entire existence as hominins, and was arguably a major factor in allowing us to become human.
One parent bearing the brunt of childcare and raising is pretty far outside the norm, and this HAS to be influencing fertility rates downward.
But also, because older sibs helping to take care of younger ones has been a stable feature of our evolutionary landscape for at least 2M years, I'm not too worried about relying on it.
My younger daughter has a best friend who lives across the street. We made a WhatsApp group for the 4 parents, and we mostly just post like "going to playground today at HH:MM". She has never spent voluntarily so much time outside (e.g. today 17:00-19:00 without parents). One weird trick to have a quiet afternoon at home.
I absolutely loath "child accompanying adult" childcare. I'm about to go shopping with my 4yo, and I know that half the trip will be me saying "no, we don't need that, we aren't going to buy that, don't take it off the shelf" and then me putting it back on the shelf or finding it in the bottom of the cart at checkout. In theory I want my kids to participate in daily activities of running the household, in practice, they are negative assistance til they're 6 or 8 and then they aren't interested any more.
I think the idea is that if you let your annoying, slow, messy kid help with tasks when they are 4yo, then they will be competent and motivated to help when they're 8. It's an investment that pays off later.
I started parenting with the intention of doing it this way, but I think if you're not a stay at home parent and don't have unlimited time to do things at a 4yo's pace, it's just pretty much impossible.
I have seen that theory: that if you let your 4yo help, then they'll still be helpful when they're 8 and 10. In practice, almost nobody I know has been able to replicate this. I think the answer is obvious: the kids being cited as examples that this works are all girls in mono-cultural villages. In my opinion, what is actually happening is that they are moving into their social gender role, which is doing chores. If you do find someone who says it works for them, I'll make a bet they live a fairly isolated existence, eg on their homestead, where they can control the culture to match their demands and expectations.
I wonder if you're doing this with the wrong "mood". How would a parent deal with this in a hypothetical past where they brought their young kid to the local market? Would they run after their kid, putting all the vegetables and produce and meat back in the stall of the local farmer telling them "we don't need this", "no put it back" and so on? That feels disrespectful and gross. No, I image they would explain the _seriousness_ of the situation to the child, and react with the appropriate gravitas when the child inevitable does do that. Stopping them, and very very solemnly explaining that this isn't our stuff and we cannot touch it. And if it doesn't stop, immediately leaving and bringing their kid with them. I imagine the kids in such a culture would very quickly regard the local market stalls with reverence, obviously knowing they can't just grab whatever they want from them. Even if they're four or five.
I think this is mostly a cultural "technology" we've lost. But it's not an unsolvable problem with the right approach imo.
Why are we assuming people brought 4yos to the market with them in this hypothetical past? If one lived on a farm or in a remote village, then going to the market was a privilege you earned by being useful on the trip. In a hunter-gatherer society a toddler might come along on a trip -- or be left home with elders for babysitting. And if they did come along, it was usually with a group of women, so someone could keep an eye on the littles.
Sure maybe they did or maybe they didn't, but my argument doesn't really hinge on that question of fact. Obviously children can be taught proper reverence for things with the correct cultural attitude in other contexts. My idea is that "no you can't have that, *sigh*" with an eye-roll or whatever (not accusing you of any of this) is the wrong attitude and is obviously (at least from the outside it's obvious) enabling the behavior.
Sure, and obviously 4yos are trainable (not sure you can say the same about 2yos). But it has to be a fight you're willing to fight (because my 4yo has a lot of fight in him) and also a fight you have time to fight. That is: you need to have the option of walking out of the store and potentially not coming back until another time.
Yes I completely agree, if you don't have the time and will to do that, you absolutely should not bring your 4yo to the store.
(but also you'll be completely fucked if you never do it because you're neglecting to raise your child)
I think this is one of the super decadent things about western culture that will be a major reason for societal collapse if we don't get our acts together soon: we don't regard this as _the_ most important thing, the thing with the highest priority in our lives. We just bring our 4yo to the store and expect them to behave but aren't willing to put in the time to raise them, to teach them, because we're.. what, too busy? Too busy doing what exactly, that's more important than that?
"as kids with other kids can entertain themselves"
This obliquely raieses a point which is a mystery to me. It seems like a huge challenge for parents is the fact that the child needs to be constantly "entertained"; this job either falls to a caregiver (exhausting) or to a screen (possibly rotting their brains), creating a constant dielmma for the parents (or, seemingly rarely, the child can be entertained by other children).
As far as I can remember from my own childhood, when I was at home, my parents would do certain activities with me, but I would also spend a lot of time playing alone or with my younger sister while one or both parents were around but doing other things. Granted, some of that time I was watching television or on the computer (screen). I was not "free range" by any means, but I did have free run of the back yard.
I'm trying to figure this out; maybe I just don't remember all the time they spent entertaining me; maybe they spent a lot of time entertaining me during the hazy years before, say, age 6, when I don't really have good memories of what my life was like, and I became more self-sufficient after that; or maybe something really has changed since then, either with today's parents or with today's kids, or with both parties. Maybe this is exactly what Lyman was talking about when he said that "child-as-subject" childcare has increased. But why has it increased?
I don't have kids, so I'd be curious to hear from parents, and maybe especially grandparents: has something actually changed over the generations in this regard, am I probably just not remembering how much my parents interacted with me, was my family unusual, or what?
(I just came up with a crazy theory. Nowadays, we've forgotten what play looks like. For adults, recreation=content consumption. Even "experiences" feel like another form of content now. Life is always either work, chores, or recreation. Parents instinctively think "the child is not working or doing chores, therefore must be provided with content; this can come from me entertaining them or from a screen, and those are the only options". The child picks up on this, and forms an expectation. I'm just spitballing here, parents are obviously welcome to explain why this is completely wrong)
I haven't listened to that podcast (I'm aware of the people, just can't get into podcasts as a medium).
But my hypothesis is that secondary childcare has decreased, and primary childcare has increased, because there's less housework being done by parents.
There's been some outsourcing to roombas, housecleaners, prepared foods, lawn care services, and overseas textile factories.
But standards for homemaking are also much lower now. I think this is a good thing (Selfish Reasons to Be a Homemaker"?). I have heard that many people in the mid 20th century used to vacuum their carpets every day. I expect there are historical reasons why extreme cleanliness was so prized then: the 19th century engrimification due to coal smoke (see the book review of The Domestic Revolution at Mr & Mrs Psmith's Bookshelf); the development of germ theory; the former prevalence of hired maids among the upper middle class vs. 20th century rising labor costs; the invention of the vacuum cleaner and other labor-saving devices. Anyway, by the mid 20th century, people really relished being able to get their house spotlessly clean. Nowadays we don't value that as much. So we can sit down and read a book with our kids, or take them on a walk, rather than completing our daily vacuuming rounds while the kids do who knows what.
I actually think it's pretty important to pay attention to racial demographics when assessing education statistics. For example, the US underperforms most other countries in test scores. But broken down by race, the US overperforms those countries (for example, US whites do better than whites in Europe, US Hispanics do better than Hispanics in Latin America, US Asians do better than Asians in Asia, etc). So the entire US performance gap is an artifact of racial demographics. And that means that there's no point in trying to mimic the seemingly-superior Finnish or French or Japanese education system. If you refuse to look at racial demographics, you'll get confused and start sending teams to study "the Finnish miracle" or whatever.
I strongly suggest not relying on Guardian articles for anything, their whole point is to confuse and outrage you in the exact way that you seem confused and outraged here. If you don't believe me, read one on a topic that you know a lot about and it should be obvious.
I think this is true only in the sense that KiwiFarms has once of the best investigative teams in the business. They are good at finding dirt on people, but this is not itself an admirable act unless you try to use it to make the world a better place, rather than just smearing anyone you dislike with a mix of real and fake dirt in the hopes of making them so scared and miserable that they stop talking.
independent of any direct opinions on the guardian (im mostly neutral on them because I dont read most of their stuff), this is interesting as an epistemological stance. I feel similarly about CNN, for eg.
What do you replace <the set of sources like the guardian> with? Or can such things be excised with no loss of generality in ones world model?
My own view is that for the sort of person who reads ACX, we are in an epistemic golden age. If you have the facility to discriminate good faith writing from bad, then the *quantity* of informative, edifying good faith content on any given topic is far higher than at any time in the past, whether that's on Substack/blogs, other independent creator platforms like youtube, high-quality magazines like the Economist, the Atlantic, the FT, etc.
Opinion pages are, essentially, useless -- longform analytic writing like you get in magazines or blogs is much better than short op-eds/editorials. You can cut them out of your life entirely and end up net-better. In fact, replacing ones you don't like with ones you agree with is probably actually *worse*. Ideologically agreeable slop is poison for the mind.
None of this has to do with factual, daily news reporting, where you should realistically probably get a subscription to a mainstream, high-quality legacy newspaper and have a cultivated smattering of various high-quality info sources you like to read on social media, with a low but non-zero tolerance for error. To be frank, the best option here is still the New York Times -- I am aware that everyone here hates them for the aforementioned op-eds/editorials, but no one is making you read them! -- but there are plenty of other choices as well. A high quality legacy newsroom has a very low error rate, and if your analytical diet is strong any egregious errors will surely become clear to you in time.
For people who *aren't* itching to read longform blog posts and lack the kind of epistemic discrimination and critical thinking necessary to determine whether a source is healthy or poison, the current era is of course a deeply confusing disaster. But I think over-identifying with these people and the resultant excess of sourcing caution is a common failure mode among people who are honestly more resistant to this kind of thing than they credit themselves with.
My own information diet tends to be something like "a combination of high level real-time sources that I have no particular allegiance to [nyt, ap, reuters are the most common], often sourced from links people send me or hackernews" + "deepdive interest areas [scotusblog, various ml paper sources like deepmind/anthropic/oai]" + "blogs of people that I trust [acx, money stuff, stratechery]"
Having a healthy information diet is tough though. I was caught in the r/TumblrInAction hellpit for a while a few years back, for e.g. and it took a lot to get out of there. The problem is that identifying problems with your epistemology is quite difficult in general
>What do you replace <the set of sources like the guardian> with?
You don't, unfortunately. On most issues, those are as good as it gets. You just need to know that there's a set of topics (race, sex, gender) that our culture is insane about, so there's no generally trustworthy source.
Well there's your problem then. You should be. Anyone who can look at all this data and not be at least a little bit confused isn't thinking about it carefully enough.
Usually, serious comparisons in western media are made between developed countries, ie OECD. Most gulf states take part in TIMMS and PISA, but their (abysmal) results should not give us comfort. Nor do we care much to learn about Peru or Vietnam.
I read about the Finnish system, felt: yep, just like my German schools were. But like many (most?) OECD-countries, classes have changed a lot in the last decade(s). Hardly a class in primary school with more than a few "traditional" names. On parent-meetings, I may be the only native-speaker. The school were my brother teaches: no teacher takes on a full teaching load anymore. Too hard.
I don't have any first-hand experience on the German education system, just some impressions and second-hand info from people who had lived there. From this, I got the impression that in Germany, the school system has a touch of 'caste', in the sense that pupils are put into paths (e.g. who can go to university) quite early on. I have even less info about the Finnish education system, but from that info it looks just the opposite. I would be interested in your take on this.
>Hardly a class in primary school with more than a few "traditional" names. On parent-meetings, I may be the only native-speaker.
Are you saying that the German education system is being overrun with immigrants? Is this universal or is it specific to a particular region or segment of society?
I would like to know - how reliable is this race/ethnicity and IQ argument advocated by people like Cremiuex or, more polemically, Sailer?
I read "The Bell Curve" years ago, and was intrigued but skeptical. If it is true, though, it is critically important. It implies that the reason we can't solve so many political problems is that society refuses to come to terms with essential facts. I'm also not so sure that the fact would lead to political solutions that conservatives would like, even though the IQ discussion is most popular among the political right. If your economic circumstances are largely determined by a random genetic IQ lottery, it supports a Rawlsian view of justice and implies that a radically redistributionist socialism may be more moral than a libertarian system that maximizes individual choice.
My own experience, and here I'm largely not talking about race, is that people have inherent limitations and I guess this is roughly what people mean by IQ. I have taught mathematics and there are some people who just don't get it even though they try with a sincere effort. Those people would generally be considered high IQ and even they are reaching their limit. To navigate life in general for people who are average or below-average must be incredibly frustrating. No wonder there are so many conspiracy theories - people at that level just can't understand how the world works so the modern world is literally a result of magic wielded by the illuminati. To the extent that this is correlated with race, it explains a lot of other problems also.
But many people say IQ is all BS and that none of that is true. You can do anything if you put your mind to it and my experience with mathematics is just that I suck at teaching.
I believe in the IQ argument about 80%. You appear to believe in it, which lends it more credence. I'd be interested to know what you (or others who have investigated the matter in more detail) find most convincing.
I don't know of any good public discussion on this issue. The tiny amount that gets attempted gets really heated really quickly, without the sort of honest back-and-forth that lets you identify flaws in one party or another's thinking.
If you're interested - which I don't recommend, it tends to make people crazy - the best sources are the ones from before the academy banned the topic, especially debates between Arthur Jensen (hereditarian) and James Flynn (anti-hereditarian). If you try to go more modern than that, there's very occasional discussion in the journal "Intelligence", and a small hobbyist race-and-IQ Substack blogosphere - Emil Kierkegaard is close to the middle, and you can find the others from his recommendations section (I don't know of anyone who puts a huge amount of work into presenting the other side, although Sasha Gusev has some decent genetics blogging from a mostly anti-hereditarian perspective). But "Intelligence" got captured by ideological liberals last year, and the Substackers are all ideological conservatives, and AFAICT they're all just repeating their own biases without engaging with each other much.
FWIW, reading _The Bell Curve_ was a major part of my becoming less libertarian and more amenable to various ways to keep the poor/uneducated/underclass from getting ground up in the gears of the system.
If you want an argument that isn't racially-suspicious, you should try Freddie deBoer's work. He argues pretty cleanly that "academic achievement potential" is relatively fixed and that nothing schools can do will alter that. And he comes to the same Rawlsian conclusion you do, that this fact supports decoupling academic achievement from the ability to have a materially-comfortable life.
I think it's worth noting that Freddie deBoer is actually arguing that he thinks the position of various groups of students relative to each other is essentially fixed, and no amount of educational intervention can create an egalitarian distribution of intellect. For him, this question of relative status and potential to be in the class of 'academically successful' individuals is essentially the entire sum of the debate, because for him the primary concern is how society uses intelligence as a moral basis for the capitalist distribution of scarce resources, and I think if you are predisposed to thinking about things in a class stratification and redistribution frame that the Rawlsian liberal mindset tends toward, this is a tempting way to see it. Nevertheless, I think of it as an extreme error.
But it's very important (as part of this post shows!) to note that the *absolute* achievement of a student is *not* fixed, and that actually both their lives and the lives of everyone in society are improved by trying to improve absolute achievement. The 'race and IQ' group actually believes this very strongly and use it to explain the Flynn effect and the relative success of American racial minorities compared to their native countries. The COVID experiment proved this pretty much beyond a doubt, with school closures simultaneously reducing test scores across the board yet also hitting already-successful students the least. If you're Freddie deBoer, this is hard proof that academic interventions don't matter, because without access to school the same relative positioning of various groups remains basically the same. But if you actually care about *how much stuff children know* this proves school is incredibly important.
Right. It turns out that the children of the white collar Laptop Class could more or less sort of get by with Zoom classes during covid, but the children of the blue collar class benefit quite a lot from going every day to an organized environment where they are talked at by middle class grown-ups.
As approximately everyone knows but some won't admit, we end up with malinvestment and wasted human potential via anti-tracking/gifted and anti-order/discipline policies when edu policy is set by blank slate race-IQ and race-personality denialists.
> It implies that the reason we can't solve so many political problems is that society refuses to come to terms with essential facts.
That is definitely the case, not only about IQ. The first step to solving a problem is to admit that you have it...
> implies that a radically redistributionist socialism may be more moral than a libertarian system that maximizes individual choice.
This is tricky. I support the idea of dumb people living happy lives... for the reasons you mentioned. But I don't support the idea of dumb people collectively deciding the future for everyone.. because, obviously, they will make dumb decisions which will ultimately hurt everyone, including themselves.
Socialism is better at feeding the stupid. (Unless everything collapses and everyone starves.) Libertarianism is better at letting the smart do the smart things. (Unless the corporations get them poisoned by lead and addicted to smartphones.) I dream that instead of debating the dichotomy we will somehow figure out a system that combines the advantages of both. Something like flat tax and minimum bureaucratic obstacles for the smart, unconditional basic income and social services for everyone, and some rules that prevent the smart from exploiting the stupid (no drugs and gambling and usury).
> But many people say IQ is all BS and that none of that is true.
Many people say that the Moon landing was a hoax.
Do you believe that mental retardation is a thing? If not, the best argument is to go visit some place for the mentally retarded and observe them. They are real.
The usual counter-argument is something like "yes, *low* IQ is a thing, but *high* IQ is a myth". (At that moment, you may notice moving the goalpost, because before mentioning this argument, even the low IQ wasn't considered a thing.)
You can see the high IQ at kids: some of them grow up mentally almost twice as fast as the others. Some of them spend the first years of the elementary school completely bored, because everything that it taught there, they have already learned at the kindergarten age -- without their parents pushing them. (Note: I don't consider answering someone's question to be pushing. Or reading them a story that makes them interested at something.)
You can see the high IQ at adults, as some of them can understand complex things at the speed of light; plus they have wide knowledge and interests as a result of spending a lot of time understanding many things fast.
The usual counter-argument is to blame all of this on privilege and/or hard work. "The kids are smart only because their rich parents bought them a ton of stimulating toys! And expensive tutors! And they are probably good at school only because their parents, obsessed with success, are making them practice homework 10 hours a day." And... well, yes, there are some kids and parents exactly like that.
But there are also kids (I have two such kids at home) who just grow fast on their own. I don't think that our toys were more stimulating that anyone else's in the neighborhood. My kids had their computers since they were small, but many other kids had theirs, too. (The other kids who had computers typically spend their free time playing Minecraft or Roblox. My kids do vector graphics and code in Scratch.) We never hired tutors, and the good school does not explain the difference between my kids and their classmates. Arguably, *I* am a good teacher, and from this perspective my kids had a privilege to have me as their parent. Yeah, that is probably a part of the story. But another part is that this configuration works so well because the children are a bit like my small copies. Otherwise, things that seem interesting to me, might seem boring to them (as they seem boring e.g. to their classmates). With regards to homework, I check that my kids do it the first thing after they return from school, but otherwise I don't care. I don't even check the homework; I just ask whether it is done. As long as my kids keep getting good grades, I am not going to micromanage their education; I am too lazy for that. -- As a summary, I attribute the progress of my kids mostly to their own innate abilities, which get some nudging and support from the parents, of course. But many other kids have supporting parents; that doesn't explain why my kids keep winning so many competitions without trying hard.
From outside, it would be easy to adopt some "sour grapes" fantasy, and start believing (without any evidence) that if my kids get good at school and win competitions, it must be because as a crazy ambitious parent I am ruining their childhood by making them work hard. If you could see our everyday life, it is more like the opposite. The kids do their homework and then play most of the day. They only read when they want to. They only listen to me explaining some interesting things when they want to. If they say they don't want to join a competition, I feel somewhat sad about it, but I am not pressuring them.
When I talk to adult people, some of them have the "spark", and some of them seem just... unable to get interested in nontrivial things. Here again, the IQ denialists could blame it on education. But I got most of my knowledge from books and internet. So you would have to explain why I was so interested in seeking the knowledge in the first place.
You won't get a pure experiment. That would require, among other things, to take kids away from their families and have them randomly adopted. Without that, you can always argue "it was their innate skill -- no, it was the parenting". And I would say that yes, high-IQ kids benefit greatly from presence of other high-IQ people in their life... including their parents, of course. But that doesn't mean that in a different family they would be exactly average.
(I hope we are all smart enough here so that I don't have to add the usual disclaimers about how IQ is not everything, sometimes hard work is just as much important, some people really are privileged, the environment matters, etc. All of that is real, of course. But the question was whether IQ is real, and based on my accumulated half century of evidence, it is my firm opinion that, *obviously*, yes.)
And, yes, we need to fix education; currently it is horrible. But one of the horrible things is that it artificially slows down the high IQ kids. While most other kids are pushed forward against their wills, the high IQ kids are often pushed back. And if we changed schools to some hypothetical perfect institutions where each child could advance according to their abilities, I believe that most kids would advance faster than today, but the smartest kids would advance *much* faster than today, so the distances between the kids would *increase*. (My kids could probably learn twice as fast as now, without working hard, if I homeschooled them. But then who would pay my bills?)
I believe that you have probably already noticed that some people are capable of having a nuanced perspective on a complicated topic, and some people are not. That, too, is related to intelligence.
I've never understood the societal scandal and disconnect here:
1. Different people have different innate abilities.
Obvious to anyone with eyes / children / any experience with other people, uncontroversial.
2. You can group people by various criteria, and then those groups will differ in innate abilities.
A basic mathematical consequence of grouping and transitivity, but now you're treading on shaky ground, eyebrows are starting to be raised.
3. Regardless of whether some of those differences are genetic / heritable or environmental / cultural, the traits are mutable or immutable to a certain extent via our societal institutions and current set of interventions, and we can roughly quantify the degrees that they are mutable / immutable, in both individuals and groups, for given traits.
Genetic studies, twin studies, adoption studies, 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation immigrant studies, and more, but now you're beyond the pale in polite society, you have spoken something that shall not be spoken, this is both thoughtcrime and wrongspeak, and if you publish on this, or even link other people to published research, you will be cancelled.
But, it literally shouldn't matter whether something is genetic or environmental, it should matter how much a given trait is "mutable / immutable according to our current state of knowledge and interventions," because that's the extent to which you can move it with public policy of any sort. That's the frontier of actionable knowledge, and we should be acting on and making policy according to that frontier.
Do things look 60-80% genetic (heritable) today because we have no repeatable interventions that actually move the needle? Sure. Is that written in stone? Absolutely not - as our knowledge improves, as our interventions get better, as some societies start gengineering, more and more of that heritability could come to be influenced by culture, environment, and specific interventions, we literally don't know.
This dynamic is frustrating, because public educational policy literally shouldn't care about any split in points 2 or 3 up there, because way back at 1, which nobody has a problem with, we should be tailoring our educational regimes to different abilities, regardless of the origins or splits or groupings, or whether it was innate or from parenting.
All that matters is that it IS true, and not why.
And at the societal level, we should obviously construct things such that 1 is taken into account too, regardless of etiology, and unleash the high capability people, and take care of the low capability people, once again regardless of mutability / immutability.
Justice and desert are poor concepts to base a society's public institutions on, because faceless bureacrats and byzantine organizations aren't equipped to judge justice or desert to a good enough standard, and it's arguable whether that's a desired moral end to begin with.
To be pedantic: I don't think (2) holds without a correlation between the grouping criterion and the measured variable. Cars vary in top speed, but grouping them by colour will not lead to inter-group variation in top speed when the groups are sufficiently large.
So I don't think it's fair to say (2) is a mathematical fact - it has to be due to a specific biological or sociological claim (which of course is the thing under debate).
> So I don't think it's fair to say (2) is a mathematical fact - it has to be due to a specific biological or sociological claim (which of course is the thing under debate).
Honestly, I'd prefer a scenario where people did some sort of unsupervised clustering like k-means to just see what reliably pops out, instead of even going in with a sociological or biological hypothesis - no claim required.
But you're right, *correlation* is required, to inform public policy. Hypotheses aren't rquired, at least until you're at the "intervention" stage. And you'll notice that it was only AFTER exhaustively testing a bunch of interventions and discovering that nothing moves the needle that all this became thoughtcrime.
Because "some traits are relatively immutable" bothers people from a philosophical perspective, we're literally wasting hundreds of billions per year collectively pretending otherwise and making school an entirely pointless waste for smart and dumb kids alike. That's not a good way to do things.
Is it tragic? Sure. Should we make sure the less capable are taken care of? Absolutely. But we shouldn't harm the *most capable* just because we don't like the fact that some traits are immutable - all technological and economic growth is driven by them, and that lifts everyone up, and grows the pie overall so you can support everyone to a better standard.
Just imagine if we actually put half the resources we spend trying to drag bottom quintile kids up unsuccessfully on gifted and talented programs and tracking for the top quintile kids.
Right. Odd vs. even Social Security Numbers should have virtually identical IQs.
I've often wondered about day of the week you were born on? Do doctors still take Wednesday afternoons off to play golf? There are not insignificant differences in the number of babies born on different days of the week, presumably due to when doctors prefer to schedule caesarean operations. That could have some lifelong impact, if say, babies born on weekends are more likely to be full term than babies born on Fridays.
The main issue with any type of socialism to flatten equality is that it makes everyone poorer long term, including the relatively poor, because of misallocation of capabilities.
I don't buy the claim that socialism is better at feeding the stupid, there's no evidence it's better at feeding anyone (and plenty of evidence for the opposite). It's a system that satisfies some type of itch for there to not be any rich people but where everyone is equally comparatively poor instead. It's not even about making decisions but about what very rich people actually bring; innovation and efficiency.
Then again, even in socialism the smarter people will get much more, it will just happen through black markets and social influences instead.
We should really stop pretending that free markets are zero sum, people becoming rich, even absurdly so, is a good thing, even for the poorest.
>If your economic circumstances are largely determined by a random genetic IQ lottery, it supports a Rawlsian view of justice and implies that a radically redistributionist socialism may be more moral than a libertarian system that maximizes individual choice.
But genetics are not random, but dependent on parents. And a moral system would then incentivize high-productive parents to get more high-productive children (so more can be distributed).
Btw: the same is true if it is not nature, but (family) culture.
Radically redistributionist socialism would make everyone worse off regardless.
Like, nobody supports capitalism because it's so fair anyway. We support it because it's efficient (better to have an unfairly small slice of a big pie than an equal slice of a tiny one, which is what you get under socialism). Some of us also because we consider freedom more important than fairness.
I think another important factor is that it's minimally interventionist. The less the state is involved in the economy the less politics becomes about territorial battles over who gets to put their fingers in the pie. Regulation also makes economies more fragile and less adaptable. In the words of Hyman Minsky, stability is destabilizing.
In my view it's beyond reasonable doubt that hereditarians have at least a reasonable point. Even before you get to specific studies their position explains the large-scale patterns in the world much better. For example: if everything is environment then why haven't racial gaps changed at all over the last 80 years in which the relative absolute environments have changed dramatically? Why don't those gaps close at high SES? Why is the current consensus on the impact of shared environment on IQ between 5 and 10 percent? How does environment explain the very specific and reproducible regression-to-mean data? And why has there been close to zero dose-response relationship in 60 years of very funding-intensive educational interventions?
>It implies that the reason we can't solve so many political problems is that society refuses to come to terms with essential facts.
Yes it would explain ... quite a lot about society and politics. Think about who benefits when there's a politically viable justification for having large interventionist and redistributionist policies.
I just reading started a short summary book by science journalist M Philippe Gouillou, "IQ: From Causes to Consequences." So far it looks good and is up to date through the middle of 2024. It's available on Amazon, both in French and in English translation.
I would be interested in a link/cite to read more about this:
"For example, the US underperforms most other countries in test scores. But broken down by race, the US overperforms those countries (for example, US whites do better than whites in Europe, US Hispanics do better than Hispanics in Latin America, US Asians do better than Asians in Asia, etc). So the entire US performance gap is an artifact of racial demographics."
Note that the scores of other countries are not disaggregated by demographic. Here is the comparison with the scores of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants removed.
I pointed that out back in 2013: American 15-year-olds actually performs pretty well on the international PISA test. Asian-Americans did on average about as well as the top East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, clearly trailing only the stratospheric Singaporeans. White Americans did better than most European countries other than Finland (which has since fallen in performance). Hispanic Americans outperformed all Latin American countries. African Americans solidly outperform the small number of black Caribbean countries that take the PISA, such as half South Asian Trinidad.
Americans _do_ pay a lot of taxes per student to achieve these results. Only Luxembourg is as free spending among PISA-taking countries.
But the conventional wisdom that America has terrible schools by world standards is wrong.
The US has more wealth dispersion than other countries. Probably that's because we have a more meritocratic system and so wealth more reliably reflects IQ differences. Also we have a much more ethnically diverse population than most countries.
Not sure comparing by race makes much sense, though. In the US, as far as I know, the ratio of immigrants in white elementary school pupils cannot be that high, while in Germany, for example, it must be a lot higher.
"[...] intra-EU free mobility still accounted for around half of the 640 000 immigrants who entered Germany on a long-term or permanent basis in 2022 according to the OECD’s standardised migration statistics (not considering the beneficiaries of temporary protection from Ukraine). Most of these immigrants from the EU have come from Central and Eastern Europe for employment reasons."
Central and Eastern Europe is like 90+% white; 99% if you include gypsies.
It only "underperforms" relative to its high economic level. That is, among the 11 countries with the highest GDPs / capita included there, the US scores 7th in PISA.
Still, even without demographic adjustment, that's not really an underperformance, as the US is 6th in GDP capita among them. [GDP per cap numbers are for 2025, and other measures like AIC per cap might be more representative, but the basic picture should be roughly the same].
> There's no point in trying to mimic the seemingly-superior Finnish or French or Japanese education system
The US actually outscored France in the linked PISA results without any demographic adjustment.
I similarly wonder about PISA outcomes of Slovakia. How much are they getting worse because all the kids are getting dumber, and how much is just Roma communities growing?
Unfortunately, it is illegal to collect data on similar things here, so... we keep talking about the superiority of the Finnish system.
We should take care in excusing our schools' performance because whites (or whatever) do 'ok'. The question is: how efficiently are they doing it? What negative experiences (enforced boredom, age based academic rails, world-is-ending fearmongering) are kids subject to the system subject to, or positive experiences are they deprived of (outside/rough play, free choice of learning topic/rate)?
I was anonymous for the first ten years of my career. The two reasons are - because if you write something people don't like, they'll try to call your job and get you fired. And second, because if you write things a journalist doesn't like, they'll write a hit piece about you, and then every person you interact with forever (like patients, customers, etc) will be like "hey, aren't you the person who the news says is an evil Nazi groomer?" and even if you're not, that's a *lot* of awkward conversations to spend your whole life holding.
Even when this doesn't happen, I think it's harder to be brave and say what you really think under your true name, and it's a relief to be able to avoid those kinds of considerations.
I thought about writing under a pseudonym when I started getting paid in 1991, but I didn't know how to cash a check made out to a pen name, so I just used my real name. I live in Los Angeles, so, fortunately, nobody cares that I'm a nanocelebrity on the Internet, because they sometimes see real celebrities in the movies walking down the street. So I'm virtually never pestered in real life.
Still, I advise young people to just pick a plausible-sounding "Mark Twain" like pen name. Life is very long, so it's hard to anticipate all the hassles that intellectual notoriety can bring.
Perhaps worth considering the possible connection between online anonymity/pseudonymity and hit pieces published by the Guardian like the one you linked. For another example see: Scott Alexander and the NYT.
I’m not sure which founders you’re referring to, but I’m sure they had their reasons. I’ve got no problem with pseudonyms but if you’re going to inject ideas into the mainstream discourse you ought to have to courage to put your name behind them. Journalists do it all the time. Want to see the hate emails and threats I get? I’m still standing. Buck up kids.
I've been commenting under variants of the name TGGP since I was a teenager, blogging since 2007. There is virtually nothing online under my real name. There is no upside to me using my real name, whereas whenever I write as TGGP people who've read me can more easily associate that with what I've written before. Twitter is FAR worse than blogging, but Cremieux writes long-form Substack posts.
IMO you are one of the most recognizable pseudonymous internet figures; apropos the Moldbug discussions in the comments of other posts, it was a comment of yours on IOZ's blog that directed me to Moldbug for the first time; this must have been in 2009 or so.
So, for me at least, you have indeed built up a personal brand under your pseudonym that is recognizable over 16 years(!)
xkcd really looks like it's supposed to stand for some expression in Chinese.
For example, I once tried to register mdzs.com and it was taken. I went to see what was there and it was a URL-for-sale page in Chinese extolling the value of having a web address that was so convenient and easy to remember.
Decades ago when I was signing up for an account on the Through the Looking Glass forum, I had recently been reading a collection of Arthur Machen (after first reading S. T. Joshi's annotated H. P. Lovecraft and noting which authors Lovecraft cited), so I used the name TheGreatGodPan. At that and other computergame forums people started condensing that to TGGP, and the rest is history.
The chronicle of Higher Ed also did a much longer piece on Laskers research colleague Pesta. Is the chronicle also what you would call a purveyor of “hit pieces”? Sometimes Nazi groomers actually are Nazi groomers…
Bryan Pesta, a tenured professor, recently lost his job for co-authoring a landmark study on the 100 year old question of whether IQ among African-Americans varies with degree of racial admixture. (Margaret Mead wrote an excellent critique in 1926 of early IQ-admixture studies and offered a better approach, which finally became technologically feasible in this century with DNA scans of ancestry.)
Which "better approach" did she offer? She was strictly against the concept altogether. It is true that it is possible to do this now but if anything Mead would've been against the modern conception too. She was completely swallowed by the ideology of cultural determinism and claimed there was no biological reality what-so-ever to race in any sense.
Pretending like it’s completely impossible that people coming from countries that have demonstrably lower performance can impact the average performance of the US? You don’t have to bring in genetics to think that it’s possible that changing demographics, which can bring changing cultural attitudes about education, might impact average scores.
It very well may not be the actual cause, but if what is a plausible explanation can’t be discussed because it’s allegedly racist, you’ll drive truth-seeking people to the side you hate if it ends up being the actual explanation.
Let me preface this by saying I don't really get them race science people. Sorting races by IQ is like sorting elementary schoolers by penis size: sure, there's an objectively correct ranking, but unless you're in a CG set by Haruomiya or Orange Powder, you've got better things to do than trying to find it.
That said, I am disappointed by that article you've linked. It says nothing of substance and is a gossip piece of the lowest order. Wow, did you hear that so-and-so is a naughty, naughty man who got punished by this college? How scandalous! Did you know whats-his-face is a purveyor of discredited theories? Discredited by who? Through which data? Who cares, they're bad evil people and all their ideas are bad and you should hate them. Speaking of data, I thought that's what counted in rationalist cycles, not who you are and what you did. I don't care if you're the CDC or Fabius Bile, if you make a good argument from good data, I will say thank you, please creampie my brain again.
This kind of zero-effort piece ought to be punished by Streisanding whatever it's trying to smear. In service of this, I will now read the whole portfolio of this Creamy Mami person (assuming that's what his name means in English, I am not about to utter the Black Speech of Mordeaux in these hallowed halls) and find out for myself whether he's right or wrong.
Scott must be getting popular because each post seems to attract someone who thinks they're the first to say "um, be careful, you don't want to be associated with someone who is associated with someone who is associated with someone who the SLPC called a Nazi", unaware that if this argument worked it would have worked 10 years ago and this place wouldn't exist.
They're always bewildered when their magic words don't work.
> Sorting races by IQ is like sorting elementary schoolers by penis size: sure, there's an objectively correct ranking, but unless you're in a CG set by Haruomiya or Orange Powder, you've got better things to do than trying to find it.
It's only important or relevant because some people keep sorting races by wealth/income/success and using the disparities as evidence that the less successful groups must be being oppressed by the more successful groups.
If we could all agree to politely ignore the difference in outputs then I think we could also reasonably agree to politely ignore the difference in inputs.
"Let me preface this by saying I don't really get them race science people. Sorting races by IQ is like sorting elementary schoolers by penis size: sure, there's an objectively correct ranking, but unless you're in a CG set by Haruomiya or Orange Powder, you've got better things to do than trying to find it."
What?
Your example has no relevance to anything but differences between groups potentially being heritable changes how these things should be taught about and what policies should be used completely. It's extremely important.
I find that it changes surprisingly little, in terms of policy.
If group A has more horsepower than group F, and ingroup dynamics work like they should, A will monopolize resources that F would otherwise access. We can correct this by taking A's stuff and giving it to F. Sometimes A will create value by using their horsepower better, but we can account for this too, so that A has the extra stuff they create (which they deserve) but share the rest evenly. In effect we'd have social programs that prioritize F, but A would still be better off in the end.
The pro-race parity folks, while arriving there through very strange paths, created a world in which we take stuff from A and hand it to F, but A still gets more resources in the end. There are still kinks to be ironed out, but the results are not so bad.
As for teaching, nobody really teaches that stuff because if you say anything other than "all races have perfect parity at everything" in academia, you will explode.
I think at that point it's a different crime than kidnapping, and I would be very surprised if there were more than a handful of cases that follow that pattern.
Can you enlighten us? If there are ~100 stranger danger kidnappings per year, how can there be much human trafficking? Do they not fall into that category for statistics?
My impression, from talking to colleagues who fight trafficking, is that the victims are not yanked off the street. Instead they are tricked into a vulnerable position by people they know and trust. Once they have, say, moved to a new city for a promised job (e.g. cleaning offices), they are coerced into turning tricks.
Does this ever happen to rich white non-immigrants? I have to admit I had never given any thought to the possibility that my kid or the kid of anyone I know would be human trafficked no matter how badly I failed at parenting.
I have not heard of it. In order to get into a vulnerable position, you have to be low on resources. Someone whose parents put them through college is not going to move out of or across the country for a menial job - they will ask their parents to pay their rent for a couple of months.
When I was a kid, the grandson of J. Paul Getty, the world's richest man, was kidnapped, held for ransom, and had his ear cut off to prove the kidnappers were serious. Ridley Scott made a pretty good movie about it recently.
In this century, however, kidnapping for ransom, like skyjacking, seems to have disappeared from the list of things that people are worked up over.
But yes, that's always been my impression as well. There's never been any shortage of pretty white girls who will eagerly accept a vague offer of a job in Not Appalachia and Not Moldova, and whose parents cannot afford lawyers or private detectives, and it's *much* easier and safer to just recruit from that population.
Kidnapping for ransom seems to have gone way down since the Lindbergh Baby era. I can recall reading numerous true crime kidnapping for ransom stories in the Reader's Digest 50-60 years ago, but it seldom seems to come up anymore. Apparently, the FBI has figured out how to catch kidnappers.
Most of the Amber Alert warnings I get these days seem to involve custody disputes between the two biological parents.
All of the reasons you might want to kidnap a 9-year-old also apply to a 17-year-old. There are additional reasons available for the 17-year-old; you might want to enslave them.
These same reasons also apply to people over the age of 18. The plot of episode 4 of Hawaii 5-0 revolves around the kidnapping of a lounge singer who has become estranged from his parents.
The reason you might avoid kidnapping a 17-year-old is that they are likely to resist, which can cause problems for you.
That's the thing about kidnapping, it makes a marvellous plot for a crime show or movie, but it's a lousy crime to actually commit in terms of risk-reward ratio.
Most serious crimes are, which is why they're generally "heat of passion" sort of deals, while successful kidnappings require premeditation, cool head, etc.
Most of my childcare hours are in the evening or weekends, and I enjoy most of it. It really just putting the kids to bed that raises my stress levels.
Especially my 4 year old daughter. She just goes through this amped up high-energy phase. The other day she was especially rebellious and crazy and we went outside for a bit to change the situation and she played on the swing and her personality was WAY different when we went back inside.
My wife just started working nights so the evenings are all me, but if I can get my almost two year old to bed (which is easier, sometimes) and then go outside for a bit with my four year old, I think the before bedtime period could improve.
My twins were also not weaned from the bottle by 1 year old. And the nighttime bottle was the last one to go. But I think in the end it was a non-issue. I remember we went on a vacation at 1.5 years old and we kept on buying little milk packets from the store because we thought they still needed a bottle to go to bed. And they never drank much. After we saw that, I think we stopped the bottle without too much of a fight.
Oh also around 1.5 was the first time where they could entertain themselves for a while: they kept on assembling duplo blocks and only when they had finished a big massive brick would they bring it over to me to disassemble so that they could start over. I remember marveling at suddenly not having to pay constant attention.
In my experience the necessity of weaning them artificially is unnecessary. Toddlers organically reach a point where they want to feel Big, and avoid the trappings of babyhood as a point of pride of their own accord.
The older one required his bottle to sleep until ~2 years
The younger one left it entirely on her own way before.
2 years seems like a lot of time... and now, all of that is 5 years into the past. Time is strange in middle age. In any case, soon (if not already) it will be just plain milk, and toddler's teeth tolerate it well, and are temporary in any case. Don't fret too much about that.
There's a certain saying old people around me tended to use, which could be translated roughly as "nobody goes to [mandatory military service] doing that". Here in Spain, that used to be males, aged 17-19, and is no longer true, but then, the spirit is more or less correct. Most things come and go on due time. Relaxing and letting things be makes one's life easier (and prevents family drama).
I mostly don't mind looking after my 9-month-old, I just hate that I don't have time for my hobbies anymore.
I wish I didn't have to work. Weekends are great, my wife and I each get a couple of hours to do things away from the baby, but normal working weekdays are just drudgery.
The hobbies thing is a bummer. I really want to re-watch some movie classics but I can't. I've been listening to a podcast about movies (mostly 80s, 90s, 2000s era) because I have a long drive. But I haven't actually watched a full length movie in 4 years. Quickly realized the other day that Guardians of the Galaxy is not little kid appropriate. They waited until Groot showed up and then it was on to something else.
my wife and I watch movies in 45 to 60 minute chunks. We can rewind at the beginning of a session if we forgot the context. It’s not as great as watching the whole thing in one sitting, but I much prefer to not watching movies at all.
"What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds?"
I think things like doing the grocery shopping / other errands with them in tow, or doing household chores and letting them "help", or maybe socialising with your friend and their one-year-old.
"KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW! I’M TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON HOW EASY TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN IS!"
This reminded me of the Thomas Hood poem, which I expect you can identify with:
My parents used to have a toy saxophone for the grandkids that would play some horrible tinny song if you hit any of the dozen buttons on it. Always the same song. And nothing you could do would stop the whole song from playing. If I heard that song today I'd probably start feeling like I was back in Nam.
Anecdotal, but I'll be interested to hear if this bears true for others - I have four kids, two boys and two girls, one of each in their teens. Two things have held true throughout:
1. Every age is easier than the previous age (even taking stereotypical teenage issues into account).
I agree, but then we are both guys. Moms seem to take the early trouble much better than the teenage-estrangement. (My own mom was and is perfect and perfectly happy with kids upto 7 or so - then it goes downhill.)
Agreed that my wife put in a ton of work, especially early on. But that just means that the benefits from kids growing easier to manage has accrued mostly to her!
I think the person you replied to was trying to say the opposite: that in his case, mom *preferred* the early age work as opposed to the late age work, because while the early age work was more physically taxing, the late age work is more emotionally taxing (think dealing with rebellious teen), and in their case the mom preferred a physical burden to an emotional burden.
The person agres, but if I may add: what to the moms seem an emotional burden (heartbreaking at times), does not appear much of a "burden" to me. I am more: yes, they are growing up; yes, those teens are having a hard time; yes, in their struggles, they do not give shit about us parents. But: Yes, great, they are growing up! I don't want my three years old to stay the sweetie he is - and it is not for not having to change diapers.
My kids aren't teenagers yet but this is clearly going to be us too. I was so happy to have them start becoming more independent so I could have some free time back. But my wife interprets them being less needy as them loving her less.
I haven't seen that to be true in my experience, my oldest is almost 17 and requires the least effort while contributing the most to our overall family success. Of course all kids are unique and maybe we just got lucky, but the trend holds across all four.
I think every age is easier than the previous age *up until* (pre)teenage years: it's true from 0 - 10 or 11. At that point things become harder than they were since, well, sometime before 5. I am assuming it gets easier again but I will have to report back on that.
Again this is anecdotal, but that hasn't been my experience; 16 is easier than 14, which is easier than 12, etc. Especially when factoring in second-order effects, older is easier (and more fun!).
The difficult part in teenage years mainly applies to about 15% of them (also happens to coincide with personality disorders). For 85% or so of people any age increase means more ease.
Almost entirely agree, though 8-12 is my favorite range. Every age is definitely easier in many respects, depending on how well you do with teenage independence and not overreacting to the bad attitudes.
8-12 they still think you're amazing and know everything, and it's a lot easier to get them to get into your own interests rather than their own. That wouldn't be healthy for them if it lasted forever, but it's still a fun time for parents who want to spend time with their kids.
Sara Blaffer Hrdy is a UC Davis anthropologist who inherited an orchard near campus. She writes about how you can get a lot more chores out of an 11-year-old daughter than a 15-year-old daughter because the 11 year old's instincts are too learn useful skills while the 15-year-old's are to perfect her appeal to a future boyfriend, which involves lots of lounging.
Why would you assume you have a job and sufficient money to support them in this scenario? And why do you think society would accept mass unemployment amongst young people without taking any action?
I deliberately ignore it. If there's no apocalypse, I would be sad if I lived my life less than fully because I was worried about an apocalypse. And if there is an apocalypse, I think I would still be sad if I'd lived my life less than fully. My kids seem happy to be alive and I think they would accept the deal of a higher risk of dying at a young age in exchange for being able to exist at all.
I would feel differently if I thought not having kids would very significantly help avert the apocalypse, but I don't think that's true.
My own (new dad) thinking is that: 1) there's no point worrying about true AI doom scenarios; 2) there's also not much point worrying about "normal" future outcomes (going to university, getting a job); 3) it is worth worrying about whether your kid is happy and a joy to be around now and for the next few years at least; 4) it's worth teaching your kid a flexible range of generalist skills that might come in useful in a range of scenarios; 5) more speculatively, it might be worth worrying a little bit about a bunch of mild doom/civilizational collapse scenarios that you can prepare your child for- mainly just because it's easier to teach skills that might be useful in a post-collapse scenario than predicting the skills that could be useful post-singularity.
Maybe this is common knowledge to other people, but what is the significance to Rotherham in the letting children roam image? Is it just a wealthy area or am I missing something...
Rotherham was the site of one of the major grooming gang scandals that happened in the UK. This involved local networks of primarily Pakistani origin men raping underage (predominantly white) girls. The image is from a British newspaper, from the font it looks like one of the RW tabloids. Hence the Straussian connection.
I.e., Rotherham was fairly safe for British kids until the British Establishment invited in a lot of the type of Pakistanis that the rest of Pakistan was extremely happy to see go: Mirpuris.
The idea was for a British firm to get the contract for a big dam that would flood the Mirpuris out of their valley, so Britain would import the Mirpuris to work in the mills of northern England.
What could possibly go wrong?
Besides the mills immediately shutting down? And then a bunch of other bad stuff happened ...
is your sense that the fact that mirpuris are disproportionately responsible for problems in Britain is due to their having been admitted to Britain through a non-selective process, where most other asians who migrate to the west are positively selected (school, work, etc)?
trying to get a sense for how much i should bias down my stereotype of ind/pak predisposition to antisocial behavior
My vague sense is that the big wave of Pakistanis to northern England a couple of generations ago was, if anything, negatively selected. So I wouldn't generalize from them. For example, Pakistanis in the U.S. tend to be respectable people who mostly keep a low profile.
Oh, I thought you meant Moorgate (I had forgotten the Rotherham thing), although the Straussian reading of that is more of a stretch because you have to bring in wordplay as well. Not that I'd put the wordplay past you.
Rotherham is not a wealthy area, far from it. It famously does not even have a Sainsbury's -- a mid-market supermarket. This image appeared in the Daily Mail years before the grooming scandal bubbled up into being one of the hot political issues of the day, I therefore assume the presence of Rotherham on it is completely co-incidental. No doubt, children did roam freely but in this particular image consider that the lake where the grandfather supposedly fished was a mine until about about 1980 when it was filled in with water.
> the lake where the grandfather supposedly fished was a mine until about about 1980 when it was filled in with water
To a casual investigation, this indeed seems to be true. It's wild that I've never encountered this criticism of the map image before, considering how much it circulates. I don't feel like it ultimately casts a ton of doubt on the story, even though I do agree with you that the map is most likely wrong.
I investigated bodies of water in the area; some other promising candidates also turned out to be quite recently manmade, but there's a small lake in Greasbrough (about the same distance, but in a totally different direction) which seems to have existed much longer: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fuPQWimSNQXpFr4E6
Google calls the body of water "Mill Dam"; some online sources suggest that "dam" used to refer to the body of water rather than the mechanism holding the water in, although I didn't check. It's hard to find information about it online under that name, perhaps because it's pretty small. The dam (modern sense) on it is called "Greasbrough Dam" in Google maps, and that gets more results. E.g. https://www.francisfrith.com/greasbrough/greasborough-dam_memory-453661 attests to fishing there (and to the reservoir having been present before the 1980s.)
None of this is terribly strong, but I think it's a pretty credible (and not at all extraordinary) claim, that some fishable body of water (especially to an 8-year-old child's standard of fishable) existed, around 6 miles from that spot, in 1919. In retrospect, it does seem like pretty bad factchecking, that the creator of the image believed they could definitively identify the lake where a child went fishing in 1919, from an interview in 2007.) But I bet the person who was interviewed for the story remembered being told it was that one, and didn't even realize that it had been altered by the intergenerational game of telephone.
It’s pretty far away from where the great grandparent lived, and it’s not easy to walk there now. Sheffield has been industrial for a long time but the outskirts were previously much more rural.
My theory why kids were safer back in ye olden days is because other people were actually outside. Teenagers riding their bikes or older kids who'd be sure to repress younger kids getting too rude. Or old people sitting on the porch, keeping an eye on everyone. The kids aren't the only ones caught by the superstimulus and that's part of the problem.
I remember hearing an anecdote told by someone growing up in the 1960s and the idea that adults had a patch where they had a kind of community responsibility for any kids in that area. That might mean giving them an earful (or more physical discipline) if they were misbehaving but it also meant keeping a basic eye on their safety.
I think this is probably not the explanation. I grew up in the burbs in the late '70s and '80s. I spent my childhood walking to friends' houses, biking around, "be home by dinner", etc.
People were not outside in the burbs in '70s and '80s They weren't sitting on porches, possibly because they didn't have porches. Burbs are not old-timey small town America. They are places people live because they mostly don't want to see their neighbors.
We were safe back then because...the world is pretty safe if you live in a decent area in a developed country? This seems like something that doesn't need explanation.
That's fair, it probably gets romanticized. I just feel like one of the major problems is that people have an alternative to going out and spending time with other people, so they choose not to.
I have to agree with this based on my experience growing up in a small town in mid-2000s Europe. There were people out and about, but the architecture didn't allow for old men on porches – and even if it had, roaming meant we spent our time in the woods, or in junk yards or on funky plots of land between train tracks. The reason we chose those places was exactly because there was no supervision, so we could listen to bad music, drink energy drinks, and build "bases" out of scrap.
The same principle applied to banned media. High-speed split-screen shooter games were very much a thing back then. Even if most of our parents banned them, there was always that one kid who had the game, so that's where we went. I think something similar would happen if parents now started banning tiktok and other reels en masse.
This comment gets at another thing I didn't mention -- we had video games back then. I had an Apple II and an Atari 2600 and later a Nintendo 64. Sure, the games weren't as good as they are now, but we liked them! (Also, have you played Animal Crossing? It is not good.)
I am absolutely not discounting the role that technology plays in the current state of childhood, but I think the effects of technology are so obvious that they tend to obscure the cultural changes that preceded and amplified the effects of technology.
My daughter doesn't have a phone. She doesn't have social media accounts. She doesn't watch Youtube. And regardless her childhood looks absolutely nothing like mine -- it has changed radically, and for the worse.
I was born in 1958 in a classic nice middle to upper middle class suburb in the San Fernando Valley (e.g., think "The Brady Bunch"). We got air conditioning about 1971. We almost never sat on the front porch, but often sat out under the lanai in the back yard.
From about age 8 or 9, I frequently rode my bike to the park about 3 blocks away. At age 12, I got a ten-speed and started riding to eighth grade, about 1.5 miles away. There was a big distinction between riding on small streets, which were safe for 9 year olds, and riding on big streets where people drove 45 mph, which were scary for 12 year olds.
When I started high school at age 13 in 1972, I resolved to ride my bike to school everyday, but I got hit by a car after a couple of months.
I think in general that people were less safety-conscious back then. I don't see many adolescents riding bikes on the major thoroughfares these days. (Note that I'm talking about Los Angeles, which appears to remain a notably cyclist-hostile town.)
100 and more years ago probably nearly every largish family had at least one child death from infection. In that context worrying too much about much rarer accidental deaths while the kids were enjoying themselves didn't make sense.
Now part of the problem is the porches don’t exist either. We’ve designed social life out of our cities. (Our company helps developers and cities put it back).
"…actually, I guess I became an anti-woke influencer (surely every good liberal mother’s worst nightmare). And I did sort of join a doomsday cult (comparatively tame but still unfortunate). Is that bad enough that my parents were right? If my kids end up as weird compared to me as I am compared to my parents, will I tolerate them as graciously as my parents still somehow tolerate me?"
A dichotomy: is being an anti-woke influencer and member of robot doomsday cult good or bad?
If it's bad, you should stop doing it and figure out what mistake led you there and whether that mistake is likely enough to also be a danger to your children. Sure, right now you kinda blame it on video games and LiveJournal, but that seems superficial and you should probably think more deeply about it.
But that's kind of irrelevant because presumably you think it's good as otherwise you would've stopped. ...
... (Or well, it kinda seems like you've gotten ambivalent about the anti-woke influencer lately, and I'd argue the doomsday cult is also wrong, as it's founded on anti-vitalism.) ...
... So if it's good, it seems more natural to teach your children about it. Like teach them about elevatorgate and the time you got cancelled in college and so on. Admittedly they are way too young to understand for now, so probably there's some open questions about feasibility here.
... And I suspect most likely the idea of teaching them this will leave an uncomfortable feeling about indoctrination? Which presumably means you're sensing the story is incomplete or that you can't fairly present it, but then that seems like reason to do more personal processing until you've got a fair and accurate view of your history.
It's bad by his parents' standards, fine by his. So if his children embrace some intellectual fad, that will be bad by his & his wife's standards, even if it's fine by his kids'.
Surely one needs to consider the fads distinctly, rather than just going by the blind assumption that whatever oneself is involved in is good and whatever others are involved in is bad.
*humans* are good by my standards; I only want humanity to succeed if it's not at the expense of the humans who constitute it; obviously there's a lot of room here to satisfy both, but I can easily imagine things that are great in terms of Darwinism fitness that would be (to me) absolutely horrifying, and effectively no different than imagining an infinitely expanding bacterial colony
You have twins so you're starting on hard mode. Going off recollections of being a child myself, I think the "easy parenting" model breaks down as follows.
Okay, before I start, obligatory disclaimer: I think Caplan is full of crap so I immediately discount his "easy parenting" message. That out of the way:
(1) Parenting is not exactly easy, but it gets easier as you get older, have more kids, and have more experience
(2) Having the first child is the toughest, because the parents are new to it all and have no idea what to do and rely on all kinds of advice and are terrified of doing something wrong and the child dies.
(3) As the older kids get older, they need less immediate/constant parental attention and can help take care of the younger kids. My sister and I did an awful lot of "keep our youngest sibling distracted while mother got on with the rest of the household tasks".
(4) Re: "[One year olds] can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they?", if there are no older siblings to keep an eye on them, playpens. You stick the kid in the cage with some toys so you know they can't get out and into trouble (until they're old enough/big enough to climb out) and you get on with what you need to do, keeping an occasional eye on them to check they're still alive.
(5) In the past, there did tend to be grandparents living nearby if not in the same house, older married siblings who could help out with advice and time, and every body in the neighbourhood treated childrearing as a communal activity. I hated the Hillary Clinton thing of "it takes a village" but it's not completely wrong. The kids are old enough to be out of the house playing outside, if they misbehave it's fine (and indeed expected) that a random adult will tell them off and even discipline them. They roam around in gangs and end up in whatever adult's house for a meal. If little Johnny ends up cycling off to the quarry in the woods, nobody blinks an eye, and some adult will generally be around to tell little Johnny "hey, this quarry is too dangerous, turn around". Or if not, well if little Johnny cuts his knees or even fractures a bone, that's all part of growing up.
A lot of the child advice books talk about how every first parent worries they're doing it wrong and will mess up and their child will die, but neither my wife nor I ever got that. I think it's a combination of me having a very stable childhood (ie my parents were so good that they made it look easy) and my wife having four younger brothers (including some ~20 years younger) such that she was always around kids and learned everything early.
The latter definitely helps if you have experience from younger siblings or seeing younger relatives. A lot of modern parents have only one or no sibling, or weren't around younger cousins at an age to learn.
There is so much emphasis on both environmental hygiene (which is necessary, but not every surface in the house needs to be operating theatre levels of sterilised) and "if you don't get it exactly right at this crucial formative age you will warp their fragile little minds forever (and then they will grow up to join subreddits about 'raised by narcissists')" that I don't blame new parents for being neurotic.
That's definitely it. If there are older siblings, or if there are a bunch of kids walking/cycling home, you can let them go. My parents let us walk home from school (about fifteen minutes) but that was on footpaths meant for pedestrians, not on a road meant for vehicular traffic.
And now that everyone is used to picking up their children themselves (I do see parents walking home with kids, not all in cars) and/or the kids would be on their own, it's precisely what you say: pick up and drop off by car because it's not (deemed) safe otherwise.
My female cousins with two kids each live at opposite ends of giant Los Angeles County, so my aunt, who lived in the middle of L.A. County, probably drove 50,000 miles per year from age 70 to 80 to look after her four grandchildren.
Looking after <2 year olds is massively time-consuming and exhausting, and pretty much always has been. Even hundreds of years ago, women (at least the overwhelming majority who couldn't afford childcare) were more or less constantly suffering the stress of (secondary, since they had work to do) childcare of their youngest. From somewhere around age 3, the minimum supervision requirement drops dramatically: modern parents just don't take advantage of this. In late 19th-century rural England, for example, it was perfectly normal for mothers to kick 3-year-olds out of the door first thing in the morning in mid-winter with a hot potato in hand and tell them not to come back until the evening.
Thank you. This is the main thing I was reading SRTHMK to figure out if it was true, I didn't get a good sense of it from the book, and you've addressed it directly. If you don't mind me asking, what convinced you of this?
As a dad of twins, I can confirm that reaching age 3 then 4 then 5 led to massive shifts in our routines and a big drop in required care (but be careful, that's when #3 comes along). Being able to get dressed, feed themselves, and get in their own carseat are some fantastic milestones.
Definitely agree. I have a two year old and a four year old that like to play outside a lot this time of year. I can trust that the 4 yo isn't going to run into the road but I have to chase the 2 yo around to make sure he doesn't.
Partly reading (the kicking-3-year-olds out the door thing comes from Larks Rise to Candleford, an amazing book if you're interested in that period of history) history books- textbooks, popular history, and actual books-written-a-long-time-ago.
That and the fact that I have a 2.5 and 4-year old, and I can see that it is possible to leave my 4-year old to her own devices for long periods without substantial danger (we don't actually leave her alone for very long periods). It's actually in many ways *easier* to look after a 2 and 4 year old together than a 2-year old alone. They play together, and the 4-year old will alert me to any issues.
Yes, the whole child freedom / parenting intensity thing is, from my perspective, for older children. Infants gonna infant, it's intense, one deals with it. It gets more intense but more joyful in toddler hood, and then easier after that (I'm told!)
Even with my 3.5 year old, she's still pretty volatile, but being potty trained, dressing herself in the morning, etc makes a huge difference.
Yeah I've actually got to the point where my 4yo is easier than my 6yo, because my 4yo just wants to play but my 6yo wants to talk all the time.
I used to think that the "why?" phase would be fun, I'd finally get a chance to teach my kids all about the world. But instead it turns out that 90% of the "why" questions are just dumb. "It's Tuesday" "Why is it not Monday?" "Because yesterday was Monday" "But what if it's Monday today?" "It's not, it's Tuesday" "But what if it was?"
> the minimum supervision requirement drops dramatically: modern parents just don't take advantage of this.
Toddlers only solo play a little. The rest of the time they want their parents' engagement even if they're capable of operating with less supervision. This is true even if you have more than one in that age range. With older siblings / relatives, it's less acute.
> 19th-century rural England
Too long ago to be a useful comparison, most people worked the land so they were never that far from their kids anyway. A rural area in that time is just bush and domestic animals, not cars. Also, they had more kids - that 3 year old had older siblings.
Toddlers do want parental attention, yes. But you don't have to give it to them. They will eventually learn to play together if you largely ignore them- my children are quite capable of entertaining themselves for an hour plus. It depends a bit what you're doing. Household chores that they've seen you do hundreds of times before is best. Parental screen time is worst.
I'm not, obviously, suggesting doing that with 3-year-olds today. I just think it's interesting that this is perfectly possible in principle.
Anything is possible in principle, at a cost. Toddlers are social beings like the rest of us, but with stronger emotional needs. It's cruel and unusual to ignore them (at length) if they don't have siblings, and probably so even if they do have one.
> an hour plus
An hour plus is fuck all, you might as well have said "it's helpful to encourage some solo activity"
My experience comports with this well. Particularly when your child has a similarly aged peer, as Scott's will always have. My oldest four children spend anywhere from one to five hours outside with minimal supervision most days that the weather permits. My one year old, much less so, but my oldest can provide the infant with enough supervision that my wife can be child-free for brief but meaningful periods of time.
As Dewey points out above, this effect is dulled by the fact that many parents (like my wife and I) immediately fill the free time with another child. But once you exit the period of your life when you have a child under the age of 3, the immediate demands on your time decline rapidly, if you let them.
Separately, trying to divide childcare time into primary and secondary seems fraught because of how dependent it is on the parent's temperament and preferences. If your child is playing in the garden, you can choose to sit and watch them, or get up and water the flowers. The demand the child places on you is the same, but the two cases will be classified differently.
I don't think this was addressed specifically in the post, but I speculate that the primary to secondary childcare ratio has risen over time, not just the absolute amount of time. Explicable perhaps by both changing parental attitudes and the lessened burden of homemaking and other home-based work.
> Even hundreds of years ago, women (at least the overwhelming majority who couldn't afford childcare) were more or less constantly suffering the stress of (secondary, since they had work to do) childcare of their youngest.
That work doesn't have to be done by the mother; it can also be done by older children.
Regarding screens... PBS is still a thing right? And console games? I watched an episode of Bob's Burgers with my 3 year old and he seemed to enjoy it.
I think it would be useful to discuss screens as a spectrum-- classic movies and documentaries on a TV on one end, YouTube Shorts and TikTok on a tiny phone on the other. Ipad games in the middle somewhere... at one end, it requires patience and good attention span, at the other it's just constant dopamine hits like a slot machine. Jonathan Haidt now says his biggest concern about phones is the "attention fragmentation" not the mental health.
Fully agree. My children have a considerable time allowed at screens, but it is the *content* which is dangerous, not the screen by itself. Go Gabbys Dollhouse, go!
Yeah, I’ve been showing my niece (nearly 3) zoo cams of pandas, elephants, etc lately. On an absolutely objective level, maybe it’s better for her formatively if I get on the ground and help her build a tower. But also, she spends loads of time with blocks and magnets, and before I showed her she had no idea that pandas were real; it certainly doesn’t feel cheap in the way that most YouTube kids (or adults’) content is.
I’d love to read a smart grand unified theory of “screen time”: what distinguishes healthy vs benign vs harmful screen time. A fleshed out version of this comment, basically, that helps me think about various screen time situations as they come up.
I think you could map each type on an X and Y graph by length and whether it's solo or cooperative/social. Playing Fortnite alone in your room would be worse than playing grand theft auto with a few friends in a basement. I would love to see that! So there would be 4 quadrants, one quadrant being the ideal, 2 quadrants being "ok" and one being "very bad"
Hmm... also need something for addictive qualities, maybe. And age of the media. My kids couldn't make it through the opening credits for Disney's The Rescuers.
I don't mind my toddlers watching Bluey or even some Pixar-type thing for a while. It's a good respite, and they frankly don't have the attention span to do it for longer than like 20 or 30 minutes before getting distracted.
I'd feel much differently about algo-slop that *could* actually keep them engaged indefinitely.
Kanopy is one of the better repositories of wholesome, education, not-super-stimulating content for young children. Their kids' content is mostly lightly-animated audiobooks of common children's books, plus some PBS-style shows. You sign up for it with your local public library card, at least if you have one and your library has a subscription. If not, then I think you're out of luck, since there doesn't seem to be a way to buy an individual subscription.
Some of the difference over time is probably because families were bigger and lived close to other families, so young kids would spend a lot of time in the "care" of older siblings, friends or neighbours' kids (and parents were presumably more accepting of the slightly increased risk of accidents).
One-year-olds are a bit young, but for say a 4yo there would be a big difference in parental investment between sending them out to play with the others vs. playing with them 1:1 and/or driving them to structured activities. The bit you quote about "Entertaining myself was my job, not hers" seems central to Caplan's ideas.
Your orange T-shirts idea seems good. Or maybe you could arrange for all the families to live in adjacent houses and combine all the backyards into a big communal play space, then you get the benefits of hands-off childcare but without needing to be confrontational with neighbours and police. I've seen housing co-ops and university accommodation (like for graduate students with families, or visiting professors) arranged on this principle and it seems to work well.
Back in the 1990s, there was a teenybopper band from Oklahoma of three brothers called Hanson. They had a big hit with "Mmmm ... Bop." Their dad was a brilliant businessman so he arranged they could soon retire rich.
They bought three big houses on one giant lot, and had six kids each. So each kid can go out in their giant communal backyard and play with his his or her favorites of his or her 17 siblings or cousins.
I suspect part of the reason people are stressed out by their kids is also because they don't know how to handle them. Nobody grows up in large close families anymore, taking care of cousins and neighbors and friends' kids. So then you're given a baby and you have to figure it out rapidly.
Your anecdote about the table though made me think about how people don't know how to get kids to do stuff anymore. It takes practice and you don't get it anymore until you're stuck in a house with your own kids!
And you read seven books and they all contradict each other and if you do the wrong thing you're a monster.
I did really like The Power of Showing Up because the message there is that you just need to try to give the kid what they need in the moment and everything else is window dressing.
"And the adult trend certainly isn’t caused by coddling. "
Depends on how one defines things like seatbelt laws, improved automobile safety, drunk driving campaigns, etc.
Adult treds aren't caused be someone in their home overseeing each action they take, true, but at least in part a directed effort to make society less dangerous. This isn't a criticism, but even as adults we increasingly want someone looking out for us.
Yeah I found this strange too: it seems pretty natural to believe that the risk aversion adults show in parenting their kids might also express itself in decisions they make for themselves!
I work from home and try to help my wife take the kids downstairs in the morning and do the first diaper change. We have two boys. A few weeks back my oldest son peed all over the backs of my legs and I had to run upstairs into my office to give a presentation and didn’t have time to clean myself up. I have to take the oldest boy to various appointments to help with his speech development. Everyone keeps getting sick so for about a month and some change we’ve been really out of sorts. My wife hurt her arm and needs a lot more help than normal and I usually have meetings all day every day back to back so it’s hard to get down to help as much as I want.
I’ve been waking up at 3am, or earlier, to do the writing that I do for substack or to work on Trust Assembly stuff. Last week when all the Trust Assembly developers met I was giving my son a bath while we were talking through phase one requirements and I just had to apologize to everyone.
I don’t think there’s a good answer here other than: decide you love your children so much that you’d die for them so inconveniences and being tired don’t matter that much, that you much prefer the world in which your son is physiologically capable of peeing on you versus the one where he’s sick or doesn’t exist, and that you’re at least healthy enough to do the work you can do while all of this is happening.
I know it’s not easy, though. But at the end of your life you get to know you did something really, really hard and that you chose it and you loved someone else so much that you dug your way through it. I am also very romantic and melodramatic, though, so your mileage may vary on how well that helps you get through the rough spots.
I think a lot of the romantic and melodramatic stuff is true, although it's difficult to live if you're focused on that 100% of the time. it's there when you need more reasons to get through the rough stuff. but it's real and it's serious and I appreciate you sharing what you did here.
The way I try to explain is that I couldn’t be a waiter because it would give me a nervous breakdown trying to make small talk and remember everyone’s orders. But I could sword fight the devil at the gates of hell because of a small change in a product development vision and not really think there’s anything extraordinary about that. I just have to figure out how to fit more things into that second category and maybe start wearing a cloak or something.
I read your recent post about your daily routine, and I wanted to say - if Jordan Peterson is right that the essence of manhood is to carry the heaviest load of responsibility that you can shoulder, then congrats on being one of the manliest men that I know.
I work from home for a Big Tech company, and my wife stays home with our two boys (a two-year-old and a three-year-old). On a typical weekday, I work seven hours and watch the boys for five hours.
As I told one of my best friends recently, there are two different types of happiness in life. Type 1 happiness is to do things that you find pleasurable. Type 2 happiness is to work on things that are valuable so that you can look back on your life with satisfaction in what you accomplished.
My life has a lot more Type 2 than Type 1 happiness right now, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to sound snobbish, which I think I did here but you just have to say to yourself, “This sucks in certain dimensions and I accept that it sucks and I’m not going to try to do anything about it because this particular kind of sucking is like vegetables and I need it.”
I don't care so much about average test scores going down because of phones or immigration or whatnot, I worry more about the exploding teen depression rates since circa 2008, when smartphones became a thing and social media really took off. You can tutor away the risk of bad test scores, so long as you have the money. But how strongly can you, as a parent, monitor your pre-teens' usage of social media? Can you tell your teen's Reels/Tiktok algorithm to please avoid showing them thirst traps, car crashes, terror attacks and unhinged political takes? By the age of 13, I had already seen (almost) everything weird and awful the internet had to show. I knew about bestgore, theync and efukt, all because of online forums where people shared weird/creepy finds for fun. All the while creating a sense of self in a worldview dominated by social media of all kinds. Test scores are one thing, but the damage open access to the internet can do to a young mind goes well beyond school work.
People need to buy their teens dumbphones without apps. That's the solution. The phones exist. They can still be in touch with everyone and you can track your kids as much as you want.
As a parent of teens (and as a parent who really hates the impact of smart phones), the practical issue is flirting/dating. 80% (or more) happens via one or two apps and not participating really leaves kids in the lurch.
I'm surprised the psych professions haven't come down harder on the risks of social media. Instead, we hear mostly about 'screens' as though binge watching Wild Kratts is somehow similar to Instagram. There are meta-analyses of studies about the correlation between Instagram use and depression, including teens normalizing self harm. Power Rangers, not so much.
[Caveat: more contentious than religion and politics combined is the subject of parenting. My kids/home are different from yours, so of course YMMV.]
My bias is that while they need to learn how to be digital natives, sure, they're not well served by social media as kids or teens. We focus on how to use GPS to explore and discover farther into the community, without fear of getting lost. "Take a trash bag and clean up this shopping center for an hour of service. Take your brother. Call me if you get lost." But when should we introduce Facebook? Speaking from personal experience, I'm not sure it's good at any age - including my own! If personal experience suggests it's bad for me, why would I feed it to my kids? Especially given the ever increasing mountain of research suggesting it could seriously mess them up.
"But they're going to use it eventually! You're just delaying the inevitable." Maybe. But I wouldn't take that same approach with tobacco, alcohol, or sex. I hope they have sex eventually, but that doesn't mean I'm eager for them to get experience with it early on.
I hope they never take up smoking for a variety of reasons (YMMV), but even if they do, I hope it's sparingly, and not out of habit. Certainly, I teach them of the addictive potential of tobacco, as well as the major health implications of using it. I don't see why Instagram shouldn't have the same warnings from me as a parent: "A large percentage of teens and young adults report increased depression, lower self image, and higher stress from using Instagram. I'm not giving you access now, because I'm the parent who decides these things now. If you choose to do that when you're an adult, know what you're getting yourself into."
If they ever start allowing babies into their own Instagram accounts, I suggest Scott strongly reconsider signing up the twins.
screen time - independent of the teenage depression / social media use correlation - may be harmful per se; i have no idea. the best excuse i've heard for parents allowing young kids social media to experience stressors is that the kids will if deprived be more isolated from peers and more vulnerable later in life to social media harms from any enforced naivete. my (3 under 10 yo) kids play roblox and minecraft and i should probably figure this social media benefit/harm stuff out.
This hypothesis (that early exposure for an otherwise harmful stressor can reduce harm) seems tenuous to me. Is there any support for it for social media, or is it pure conjecture? I'd like to see some good evidence for it before I rely on it.
In any other situation (e.g. porn, cigarette smoking, sex, gambling) my prior world be that early exposure would have the opposite effect, predisposing them to harm or addictive behaviors before they're mature enough to make nuanced and careful decisions in a complex environment. I admit this is also pure conjecture, not evidence-based, but it feels like one of those Chesterton's fences with a bull in the pasture beyond.
Also, it's not clear to me how much social media enhances vs. replaces social interaction. If the former, great. If the latter, it's a net harm all around. I'm sure there's a little of both going on, but if my kids are anything like I am (they are), the balance will not naturally tilt toward enhancement of social interactions.
Yeah, the important thing is not "more screen vs less screen" but what exactly are you using the screen for. Vector graphics editors are better than Facebook. Khan Academy is better than YouTube suggestions. Legend of Kyrandia is better than begging for more money to spend on Roblox.
We should teach the kids to use the screens responsibly. And we better do it before they start getting lessons from their classmates.
I'll post this link twice in these comments... There is a strong case that the depression is caused by the coddling (no independent play, constant risk aversion, adult decisions for everything) more than the phones. Peter Gray at Play Makes Us Human lays it all out:
A good reason to doubt that the teen depression rate is real is that suicides haven't really increased in OECD. The criteria to diagnose it is much laxer and there's social contagion through tiktok. No one would get diagnosed with depression because their dog died 40 years (causal life events were excluded in the first place) ago but it's a very likely scenario today.
> Only 10% of variability in alcohol addiction is shared environmental (eg potentially due to parenting); should this also be our estimate for phone addiction?
Whenever I see these studies I’m not sure it’s evidence of anything. Isn’t this just the mean variability that a study found? I.E. If you have your heart dead set on making sure your kid is not an alcohol, or a phone addict, and you put in significantly more time and effort than the average family (which is usually nothing), you’d be able to significantly over-perform this metric.
Genetics can predict quite accurately how much weight you can bench, but deliberate effort can blow that number out of the water.
You're sort of right, but I also think of the studies as sort of estimating the elasticity of outcome with respect to intervention.
That is, you have some idea how hard other parents try to keep their kids from alcoholism. Let's call that X effort. If the studies show that X effort produces minimal results, then it seems like most techniques barely work at all, and you need to either be much smarter than other people (use different, better techniques) or believe that you can put in an absolutely crazy amount of effort (plus have faith that the crazy amount of effort will work).
It also suggests that there's a strong genetic component, which naturally makes it less likely that any given effort will work.
I guess it depends on what the prior is on how much effort the average parent puts in. My guess would be almost none, so even moderate effort, or very intentional minimal effort, might have a very large effect.
I’ve seen parents to keep their kids from underage drinking, but I’m not sure how many parents will even discuss alcoholism (unless there’s an alcoholic in the family, at which point any deliberate effort is conditional on being in an environment where people drink a lot, and likely having a genetic disposition for alcoholism).
It’s like, how much exercise does it take to be healthier than the average American, within the range of health outcomes that can be changed with lifestyle? My intuition is almost none, since if you exercise for even a few minutes per day you’re easily in the top 50%.
I think I would say something like - most people don't put in much deliberate anti-alcohol effort. But a lot of the things you would do are things like loving your kid more, or making them better educated, or being strict disciplinarians, which there *is* a lot of natural variance in. So you would have to explain why whatever you're going to do isn't picked up by that natural variance.
I don't really think too much about alcoholism, but as for screen time, I think there's some plausible interventions that take additional effort (maybe better phrased as not taking less effort) which 95% of parents aren't doing. Homeschooling would be a good start, and I think you could plausibly limit all exposure to social media or any short form content until a kid is a teenager, so long as they aren't in a peer group that is using social media.
I look at the persistence of cultural groups across centuries, and I get the feeling that the concept of teenagers rebelling against the values of their parents isn't really a necessary thing. Maybe the forming of coherent values that a child self-enforces is really, really difficult, but there's some major world religions that forbid alcohol consumption, relatively successfully, and I don't think that's because they're less genetically disposed for it. If successful cultural memes can cause major differences between cultures in the metrics we care about, I would be very surprised if deliberately cultivated cultural memes and life experiences in children couldn't have that same effect.
At least for things that are plausibly within an individuals abilities of self-control to change, like how much social media we use, or how much alcohol we drink.
I still buy Caplan's argument though. I think a huge amount of the resources put into kids are either pointless (as in they don't make children much if any happier in the meantime, and don't influence their life outcomes at all), or are only useful so far as they allow people to successfully play status games and get the best signals of success.
If you convert to Mormonism and move to an all Mormon dry town in remotest Utah, you can probably significantly reduce your child's chance of becoming an alcoholic, at least before age 40.
Exactly. This is the major reason why it casually attributing 90% of a child's likelihood of becoming an alcoholic to chance and genetics seems wrong to me.
You probably don't have to go that far to have an appreciable effect either. Spending some time to cultivate a healthy understanding and attitude about alcohol is probably a good start.
I think a lot of that "genetics matters, parenting doesn't" relies on the assumption that in general people will be responsible parents.
Sure, whether your kid ends up an alcoholic may depend heavily on genetics, but nobody takes that as a reason for "well my kid doesn't have alcoholism genes, so it's okay for me to crack open a beer for my six year old to drink with me" and have the kid drinking a six pack himself by the age of ten.
In all fairness, for people who think about these things, being a minimally responsible parent is pretty much a given.
I worry though that this sort of thinking will cause parents to allow addictive behavior when they’re young and impressionable on the assumption that preventing it when they’re young won’t actually work. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large portion of tobacco addiction could be attributed to genetics, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if 90+% of people who started smoking before the age of ten kept the habit for their entire life.
>The rate of adult dependence is highest for individuals who experienced onset of regular use in middle childhood to early adolescence, with peak risk of adult dependence (43%) corresponding to regular smoking onset at approximately 10 years old.
Interesting how the dependence ratio is significantly higher for females. The study Scott linked also found a significantly higher % shared environmental factor for females than it did for males.
Maybe environment plays a larger role in female development than male development?
Interestingly Caplan himself muses on this question in a blog post a couple years ago called "Do Ten Times as Much":
> Take parenting. Most readers summarize my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids as “Parenting doesn’t matter.” But that is only one possible interpretation of the twin and adoption data. The data is also consistent, however, with the theory that most parents are barely trying to get results — at least on many relevant margins. I pondered this in depth before I started homeschooling my kids. I’m always stunned by all the economists who fail to teach their kids about supply-and-demand. All my kids know about these holy diagrams. What’s the difference between their kids and mine? I did ten times as much.
At one, I could absolutely do secondary childcare by cooking etc while my baby toddled around, stacked blocks, etc. With my almost 1yo, I could have a grown up conversation with an adult while he dragged bike helmets across the floor.
We baby proof an entire floor, so we don’t need to have eyes on the baby at all times.
With siblings, it’s more complicated, but our two big girls frequently parallel play or play with each other without parental involvement.
I should add that when I was pregnant I paid a lot of attention to how my friends with three or more kids parenting so I could mirror it with my *first* kid.
I’m further away than many parents on the playground, I let kids take a crack at solving problems themselves (and live with eg their shoes being on the wrong feet), we bathe them less!
I conjecture that how easy or hard parenting is depends a *ton* on how quickly you're inclined to accrue stress during "secondary childcare"; and this depends a whole lot on your particular brain, not just on the age and personality of the kids. I mostly can't cook while other *adults* are around being polite and fairly quiet, let alone while toddlers are dragging helmets across the floor. I knew I was a big old "nope" for having a kid as long as I'd need to do significant amounts of "living my life in earshot of kids". I bet that if you can comfortably read dense nonfiction while two people hold a conversation right next to you, this predicts that you'll roll well relatively with the attentional challenges of secondary childcare! I am the opposite of that (which fortunately I knew going in).
Our Belief networks - both facts and values - encode strategies for navigating life. As technology accelerates, the impact of different value structures is going to lead to more divergent outcomes, because technology makes it easier to get what you want. So I think we will see in the coming decade increases talk about questions that the 20th century considered “obsolete” - questions like, “what does good mean”? - because it will be come clear that everything we do and think is value laden, and that most value systems leave you under the control of a machine that has mapped out your limbic system more accurately than you have.
The classical answer to the “put down the phone” question is, “your kids need to cultivate the virtue of obedience.” This is what I tell my kids: if you don’t learn how to obey someone that loves you, you’re going to obey the dictate of a machine that sees you as food. Of course, this depends ultimately on me telling them, that I also have to obey a source that loves me and knows more than me.
I believe the return of cultural Christianity is going to largely be a function of people understanding that the only alternative to being a slave to your emotional responses (as poked by a machine) is to choose to obey a conscience trained on the concept that there’s one good thing, which is also the root of causality.
They don't have a say in development of either culture or technology. Of course, if civilization collapses soon, they'll be better positioned to survive than most, but otherwise their strategies don't seem particularly interesting.
Wow, great post, you've succinctly organized in a few phrases something I've been thinking for a while.
My less sophisticated way of putting it is "how can you tell your kid something is wrong, without having a fixed basis for what wrong or right even is?". Or "on what authority can you tell your child that something is wrong".
A few years back I started hearing parents (and teachers) saying "that's not okay" when a child did something bad. Is that because in our current age of moral relativity we can no long define "bad"?
That being said, I'm just not sure what a conversation with my kid where I say "if you don’t learn how to obey someone that loves you, you’re going to obey the dictate of a machine that sees you as food" would look like, ha ha...
My obligatory urbanist take: it is taken pretty much as given in the r/fuckcars, orange-pilled and so on circles that one massive reason that kids don't have as much freedom these days (in some places) is cars. When I was a kid I walked to school; try doing this in North American suburbia. Where I live primary-school age kids bike everywhere — that is not feasible in car dependent places. Although I do agree with you that a large part of it is cultural: there are literally jurisdictions where "children" under the age of 16 (sixteen!) cannot be outside without adult supervision, and that includes on the street in front of their house. Insanity. I went everywhere on my own by the time I was twelve, and I'm younger than you are.
I don't think this is a meaningful part of it. In the car-centric suburbs I've lived in, you usually have a division into "neighborhoods" of ~500 houses each, with one park / pool / school in each. Within each neighborhood, there are only very small side streets that kids older than three can easily cross or even play in, and the main streets are only between neighborhoods and other neighborhoods, or between neighborhoods and commercial areas. So it seems like we should be able to let kids roam within a neighborhood, go to the local park/pool/school and the houses of any friends within your nearest 500 neighbors. But in practice I don't see parents doing this much.
I've always been confused by the car argument because the suburbs seems pretty idyllic for this, much better than having your kid live in SF and the nearest park being down Market Street or across the Tenderloin or something.
That assumes that faster, busier roads are more risky. obviously they are if you blindly wander into the road. But beyond toddler age they don't do that, so risk homeostasis comes into play: A kid will be wary of a fast, busy road, but might dash after a football into a road they 'know' is safe. I've seen some statistics to this effect (which were actually on cats not kids - the Bristol Cat Study - but possibly the effect applies the same) .
I actually do think that a lot of the range reduction is due to cars. This coincides with my lived experience - when I was a kid (in the 80s) I was allowed around the block at a young age. A kid was hit by a car (unavoidably, by the driver), on my street (which was a quiet street) and (from what I remember,looking back) all the local mothers became more risk-averse.
Edited to add: However we also still let cats roam, in the UK. That might make a good control, except that I'm not sure anyone was keeping cat road accident statistics more than a few years back.
I think cars have been common for much longer than the 80s. You being around the block at that age indicates differences in standards that can't be chalked up to cars.
I grew up in a suburb in England in the 70s/80s. If you look at a photo of a street from that time, there are a handful of cars parked on the side of the road. There was maybe one car every ten minutes driving slowly by. If you look at a photo of the same street now, it's jam-packed with parked cars and non-stop cars going down the middle.
So yes, there were cars back then, but they didn't interrupt our playing in the street at all.
I agree I wouldn't want my kid literally playing in the street even if it was 99% safe, but I still don't see why this would prevent an eight year old from going to the local park.
Fair enough. Eight sounds a bit young to me, but I'm hardly an expert on eight-year-olds. I guess if you were taking them yourself before then, you'd have a good idea if they were too distractable to get there safely on their own.
Not sure about that. For context, I'm European, always lived in walkable/bikeable places. But I've been to North American suburbia, and from what I've seen it's a very human-hostile place. Very little space for walking (often to the point of literally not having sidewalks), no biking infrastructure (sharrows at best), highway-width car lanes encouraging speeding...
I can't reply to the Tenderloin or Market Street example (since I have no idea what those are), but cities are way more kid friendly than North American suburbia as far as I can tell. I mean, I grew up in a city. You just walk/cycle/take public transport everywhere. It's safe and easy. I live in a city now, and kids just... get around. There's green spaces within fifteen minutes of your home. From what I remember of North American suburbs it's mostly just this profound feeling of dissociation. You're just walking past these endless, identical houses, with massive front lawns with nobody using them, and there's no sidewalk, and when you finally reach your destination it's this massive car park that's totally out of any kind of relatable scale, and so on and so forth. It's just not a place to exist if you're not in a car (granted, my experience is limited to a small sample size. But my conversations with Americans reinforce this. I can't count how many times I've heard them tell me how they experienced cultural shock because of how walking/cycling friendly the streets here are).
Edit: I don't want this to be like an "America Bad vs. America Good kinda thing. There's plenty of Western Europeans who enjob bashing America unfarily, and I disagree with them. I like plenty of things about America. I'm just making a point about this one specific issue.
Some parts of America are as you describe, but much of it isn't. Sidewalks are quite common, as are nearby parks, large front yards with enough space to play, and streets with very little traffic. I'm quite critical of this land use pattern, but I don't think it's fair to characterize it as hostile to playing children.
Below are a few Google Street View images that I think typify American suburbs. I picked them more or less at random.
Certainly, a three-year-old cannot be trusted to sit down in the middle of a road in these places, but an eight or ten-year-old could. I don't think this is overall a good thing, but in many of such places, the streets are laid out in an intentionally winding and directionless way to discourage through traffic. There's almost no reason to drive on these streets unless you're going to one of these houses. Such drivers are both rare and generally not going
I raised my first child in a suburb, am raising the second in the middle of Chicago. The specific mixes of free-range risks seem _different_ in those two environments but not particularly higher/lower. And I don't detect any meaningful difference in parental decisionmaking on this point between the two.
Also, curious about jurisdictions having that law up to age 16. I am familiar with it up to ages 12 or so but not higher. [I know of curfew laws having higher cutoffs, including in Chicago, but of course that's not nearly the same thing and not at all a new thing.]
Where specifically is adult supervision required for any child to be outside up through age 15?
I don't understand this, I live in a totally car-dependent area, and kids all walk and bike to school here and are outside on their own all the time. Do you not have sidewalks? Speed limit is 25 in most residential suburban neighborhoods and they have speedbumps and stop-signs, etc. No real difference in level of cars over the past 40 years.
Growing up my the elementary school was only 1.5 miles away, but there were no sidewalks, and there was a school bus. Same with middle school- no sidewalks! High school was in another town, and not walkable. It's still the same today.
I went to school from K-12 in 1964-1976 in Sherman Oaks, CA, home to the then-busiest freeway interchange in the world (405 San Diego Freeway -101 Ventura Freeway).
I rode my bike more then than kids do now, but I also got hit by a car at age 13. My guess is that people are more safety-conscious now than then, just as fewer people have trampolines in their yards than they did then.
Is today's safety consciousness more unreasonable? No.
Oddly, it's the other way round here - I'm seeing a lot more trampolines in yards now because those were never A Thing as I was growing up. Though they are the more child-safe ones with netting in case the kids bounce off.
OK, yes, that makes sense, there have been big improvements in trampoline safety.
The Twitter account Super 70s Sports runs a lot of photos from 40-80 years ago of kids playing on public playground equipment that looks absolutely lethal to 21st Century eyes.
Oh gosh, when I think back to the playground when we were kids in the 70s, yeah it would *not* be permitted today.
It was a fairly new one at the start, but wasn't really maintained so apart from the things like "if you fall off the swings you will hit your face on tarmacadam", when the chains on the swings broke they weren't replaced, so half the swings were lopsided and ready to break loose at the height of your arc. All you say brings back the memories... the sharp edges on the slide, the lack of anything to prevent kids flying off the end and splitting their skulls open, the rusting equipment, the risky behaviour of older kids on the 'swing boat' type equipment which of course they tried to make go as high as possible - all the Good Old Days when this is what you got your tetanus shots for, after all! 😀
For the analytically inclined, parenting is constantly adjusting to each new stage of child development. The problem is that the stages are fluid and just when you think you're in a new stage, it's changed again. The results is that each day is another adjustment. So, why parent at all and not just outsource it (to babysitters and nannies)? Usually, it's because we love our children. We don't do it for their long-term success or expected outcomes (although that's a great side benefit when it occurs), but because we hope to impart our values, which we typically believe are worth living by, and thus also worth passing on. No wonder that so many offspring occupations are reasonably close to their parents' (we are what we repeatedly do... or are exposed to).
So, you can embrace the constant deluge of parenting change as simply a part of parenting and a consequence of reproduction - seeing their small stages of development as stages to adjust your approach to parenting, or you can adopt the less-analytical approach that parenting is best performed as employing general principles that function no matter the stage - kindness, love, compassion, respect, guidance, community, support, etc.
We allowed our 7 year old girl to walk around the neighborhood alone (for example to visit her grandparents, who were a 15 minute walk away). Unfortunately there were no other kids her age outside alone so it didn’t make sense for her to be outside alone all the time. We didn’t tell her it was unique that we let her do this and she was fine. Until one time two teenage boys on bikes were laughing and pointing at her “look, it’s a little girl walking alone!” She became scared and self conscious and didn’t want to walk alone anymore.
Then we moved to an orthodox Jewish neighborhood, which means there are always lots of kids playing outside, especially on weekends (and very few cars driving on Shabbat). And now our kids are (ages 4, 7, 10) play outside all the time and it’s fine.
I think the phone problem is not just kids on phones way too early, it's parents on phones while they're with the kids. Not to say that parents can't or shouldn't be on their phones, but I've seen too much of "mother on phone ignoring child". That's going to skew normal interactions and development (mother not speaking to or interacting with child is a big way of retarding development) and will have negative effects down the line even before child phone use comes into play.
This review would benefit from reviewing the Freakonomics episode partly inspired by this book and the follow up 10 years later (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-economists-guide-to-parenting-10-years-later/). The follow up really put me off the philosophy. Caplan put more resources and effort (homeschooling them, seems like he taught them 10 hours of economics a week, and then had them stay at his office to socialize with all the professors) into his parenting than most people possibly could, not really supporting his book. Levitt says he was chronically sleep deprived and doesn't even remember what he did for parenting. His kid says he wasn't actually present as a parent and was always golfing instead (he thought that his going golfing would instill a hard work ethic into them by showing them what practice means).
I've read that transcript and I'm not sure your summary is accurate, nor do I get any doom-and-gloom. Levitt does say he was chronically sleep-deprived, but that was due as well to being a big-dog professor and writing a book, and where does he say he blacked out and remembers nothing? (He just says "I listened to the podcast episode that you did 10 years ago and I was already completely humbled by then. I think I was sleep-deprived chronically.") And he did do a lot of golfing, but where does he say this was meant to instill a hard work ethic? There's only two refs to golf and the first one is entirely humorous ("I mean, I would say if you came to our house and you had to guess what our professions were, you might think that we were fortune tellers and, I don’t know, failed professional golfers.").
Levitt says "I was a little surprised that both of my older daughters, their main memory is that I was completely absent, that I was always golfing, which is true. I did do a lot of golfing. I didn’t know they realized I was doing a lot of golfing." The part about intending it to be a life lesson is probably something I made up (it's been a couple years since I listened to it). Levitt does say he can't remember how he parented his first set of kids ("I couldn’t really remember how I parented the first time around, and it was all just a bit of a blur") but it's not clear if that's connected to the sleep deprivation.
I don't think Caplan has done poorly as a parent - I think he just hasn't done what his book recommends (I haven't read it, so maybe I'm wrong about that). Levitt seems much more questionable from this interview, as judged by his own children (who say he is doing better now on his second set of kids).
"Exactly. If we were going to try to teach parents something, it should be, “How do you model behaviors that your kids can follow?” That really framed my view of the world, which is that I’m not sure what you say to your kids matters very much. I think at some fundamental level, it’s what you model 24-hours-a-day in your own behavior. So, I think what my kids saw was they saw me willing to get up at 5 in the morning to go to the golf course to practice doing the same thing over and over. And that somehow instilled in them the idea that, even though it was golf, which seems stupid, that hard work and diligence paid off."
And as an aside, he also says he wasn't working hard at work at the time: "I was pretty lazy about academics by the time the kids came around, to be honest. I think I didn’t model as well as I probably should have."
(A relief to know that this memory, at least, was genuine. I was so certain he had said it.)
To which I would respond, he’s not taking his kids to the golf course, right? So they’re not there to see his hard work, the pride he feels in his good score, the camaraderie he feels with his golf buddies. All they know is that he’s not making pancakes with them Saturday morning, that he has something he values way more than that. Maybe if he’d modelled that hard work for them in his job, they’d be able to see the success of that hard work in a way that could be compared to their own schoolwork or their friends’ parents’ work; building relationships might have been a better thing to model on the weekends
I see more attractive young women on the golf course in recent years. My guess is that they tend to be daughters of golf-loving alpha males. A few generations ago their dads would have focused on their son's athletic careers, but now with smaller family sizes, executive dads focus on their daughters' golf games.
Steven Levitt retired fairly young for a U of Chicago economics professor to get in more time on the golf course.
He seems more like a corporate executive type than a professor.
I seemed to get in more famous spats with people who had a lot in common with me, such as Levitt and Gladwell, than with people who didn't. I don't believe Malcolm Gladwell is a golfer, but I could well imagine him being one if fate hadn't taken him to New York.
I was a ferrel kid…as were most of the kids in the early 60s. I left home after breakfast and didn’t return until I heard mom calling me home for supper. Everyone I knew was the same. Lots of kids (no birth control) and lots of fun. It was a great childhood. No Air conditioning. Only a few cartoons in the morning. 3 TV channels. I feel sorry for all the indoor kids today.
When you say that mom would call you for supper, does that mean you were always within voice range of your house? Or did you deliberately head back home around suppertime?
I'm obviously not Not Me, but this was a summer pattern for me growing up (90s Russia, a community of mostly summer residents with a few year-round ones). There was something of an expectation that I should generally be within sight or voice range, particularly during the week when it was just grandma and I; on weekends when mom came down from the city, she was more willing to go hunting for me, so I was allowed to say "we're going to XYZ" and go. I also suspect that there was a decent amount of flexibility in when mealtimes happened, i.e. if I wasn't easily found, the meal would just happen later (and I might get scolded). I don't remember how we handled the "bring a friend to lunch / dinner" in terms of communicating this to the friend's own family.
Having kids, and truly caring about something more than myself, was the key step in becoming a content adult. Nothing else in my life has ever provided that level of clarity and certainty.
And the first two years with twins was exhausting. But it gets much easier. And there are inevitably really rough spots along the way. I do think retiring the word "parenting" is a useful step... I don't use "brothering" or "husbanding" as it is all just part of being a family.
So, here's my unsolicited advice:
-whenever possible, have kids walk to school and play outside unsupervised. Get them a bus pass and/or a bike and let them explore on their own. Our 3 kids are regularly gone for most of a day and have done so since they were quite young. They have watches and usually have a time when they need to be back home.
-limit screen time to movies/actual shows on a television
-no video games for anyone
-no smart phones until at least high school and then with limitations
-do homework without distractions
-set aside time for "recreational" reading every day
-have supper together at night
-avoid the pay-to-play experiences (travel sports, private lessons, etc)
I don't disagree, but it seems like a chicken/egg question. I see so many parents driving their 4 or 6 year olds to music/dance/soccer lessons and the kids have no interest or aptitude in any of it. I think that type of premature over-scheduling likely drives kids away from activities.
Busy roads were the boundaries. There is a busy road near our house and I would help the kids cross at 5 years old and they would walk the ~1/2 mile to school. But that was with a group, including older kids. When they were a bit older, when they would walk or bike to visit friends, they had to pick options that didn't require crossing those roads or I would get them past that spot. I think the details vary significantly by neighborhood and by a kid's maturity.
I don't know why people take a strong stance against video games specifically. They're better than TV on every dimension - they're more social, they offer goals and opportunity for agency and skill development. The educational benefits can be stronger. They force kids to reckon with failure and encourage them to overcome it.
It's just about which games you let them play and how much. I would rather let my kid play chess on my phone than watch a movie. I play Minecraft with him too, where we set ambitious creative goals for ourselves and work and problem solve to complete them, while bonding together. I've used it as a vehicle to teach him about science ("how does a furnace work?"), engineering, manufacturing, electricity (redstone), coding (redstone again), history ("do people really live in castles?").
This comment is high in combativeness and low in substance, and doesn't really deserve a reply. But I'll just say that *of course* I also endorse playing sports and such together too (even though it's also an activity made up of "meaningless, virtual, fake goals" like putting the ball in the net over and over, which develops "useless skills that don't translate anywhere else"). That goes without saying. But there's a lot of hours in a day, and when it's 5:30am, cold and dark outside, and we're trying not to wake mum, playing a game together for an hour is just better than watching TV in every way.
You playing with your kid sounds great but I'd guess that 99.999% of kids playing video games don't have that experience.
I think the strong stance is that video games absorb a huge amount of childhood and teen (and adult) hours beyond the point of learning or growing from the activity. Does any kid play 20 minutes of video games a day? I see a massive number of my kids' peers who mindlessly play for hundreds of hours a month. It is hugely addictive, to the point that I've seen 10 year olds playing fortnite on their phones while they are in the outfield during the middle of a little league game. For me, not having the temptation is much easier than trying to monitor and schedule and regulate, since the benefit, to me, is minimal at best.
As for whether video games are "better" than TV or movies, we'll have to disagree.
I don't think it matters if every other kid is addicted to games - that's just a choice that other parents have made. It's very easy to moderate your kids game time if you want to, the same way we can choose to restrict all other things that kids find addictive. There's even an app for Switch where you can set the amount of time they can play per day before it locks them out - though I haven't needed to use it so far.
This is not to try to change your mind - you're clearly a great parent and I'm sure your choices are right for you and your kids. I'm just putting forward a case for the other side. I see this opinion a lot and find it confusing that society generally sees games as the lowest form of entertainment, whereas I think they can be one of the best. To me it's like hearing that people won't let their kids read because they're worried they'll sit on twitter all day - the reading is not the problem.
> It's not easy once they are addicted and it's what they are used to.
I'm not sure what you mean - you can physically and digitally restrict kids from having access to games, so of course it's easy. But the point is you don't let them get addicted in the first place.
>And besides screens and perhaps some foods, what do children find addictive?
That probably mostly covers it, though "screens" covers quite a few of the activities I had in mind
I appreciate your measured tone (and I'll let you know that I am just an ok parent). A big part of my aversion to video games is my own experience. To the extent there are exploration/social/coordination benefits, those are, in my view, much better developed doing sports and outdoor activities. And, if left to their own devices, my kids, and most kids, would play video games for hours, which requires a level of supervision that runs counter to my goal of letting them be more autonomous. Obviously individual results will vary and I'm glad you found a balance that works.
> I don't think it matters if every other kid is addicted to games - that's just a choice that other parents have made. It's very easy to moderate your kids game time if you want to, the same way we can choose to restrict all other things that kids find addictive.
Some people would say that "every other kid being addicted to games" is a sign that they're a memetic hazard overall, just like Instagram or Tik Tok.
And sure, you can make sure your kids smoke responsibly, while you're in the house and supervising - but this vastly increases their chance of being a heavy smoker later in life (by 1.4x, per another comment in this thread).
My own take on video games (as a person who loved them as a boy) is that the reason they're a memetic hazard is twofold:
1). They counterfeit effort and progress in the real world, by giving you much-easier-than-reality progress ladders and tangible successes for median levels of effort, all the while giving you the social status and "cred" people crave, and that would in its proper form stimulate actual achievement. There's a decent chunk of gen Z boys who essentially opt out of life for this comforting pseudo-progress and status ladder, rather than achieving things in the real world.
2) It's a representative sample of the adversarial dynamics visible in things like Tik Tok, Netflix, and junk food, wherein thousands of Phd's on the other side have pooled their collective brainpower for years to optimize against individual people's inbuilt drives and neurological hooks, in the service of promoting increased engagement and recurring revenue. It's just a matter of good principles to opt out of as many of these adversarial systems as you can, both personally and on your kids' behalf.
> 24 participants met IGD criteria, giving an IGD prevalence rate of 2.8% in this sample. It is noteworthy that the mean score for IGD severity was 4.17 out of 20, suggesting that most people in this sample had low levels of IGD symptomology. It is also noteworthy that those who met criteria for IGD had significantly higher IGD symptom severity, social exclusion and impulsiveness, and significantly lower self-esteem, control of their environment, parental attachment, family connectedness, and self-control.
Playing games is just one of many activities that parents should teach their children to enjoy in moderation. There shouldn't be much concern about child becoming addicted while a child - this is easy to control if the parent chooses to. So the question is just about whether playing games in moderation as a child makes them more likely to be addicted as an adult. I don't know whether that's the case - I don't think smoking is at all a fair comparison because you're talking about a chemical vs behavioural addiction, the latter of which is much easier to teach a kid to avoid. When children become adults they have access to a million things they could become addicted to and I think helping them practice self control at home is better than letting them discover it all for the first time at 18. But I think genetics is probably a bigger factor anyway.
But I also disagree that video games as a medium is some uniquely addictive thing. In 2 you're referring to a subset of games - the freemium/IAP/subscription model. You won't find those games in my house* and I'm not endorsing them**. They are the Tik Tok of the games world. But people don't ban kids from the medium of video because Tik Tok exists. Or ban kids from reading because Twitter exists. The negative qualities of games that you describe in 1 all have their positive mirrors if they're used in the right way, with benefits in education and mental health*** (as well as just being fun, artistic, a source of inspiration etc etc).
* well, Minecraft does have IAPs now unfortunately, but they were tacked on by Microsoft after they bought it - they aren't integrated into gameplay.
** though I think it's fine for people to play in moderation, it's just junk food
> Overall, we have demonstrated the current evidence wherein commercial video games serve as a useful corollary and easily accessible tool for decreasing the severity of symptoms of depression and anxiety
> To reign in the hyperbole, something like 2.8% of kids are clinically addicted to video games, and those that are are a particular kind of kid:
I believe this is an unrealistic narrowing of the overall likely impact, predicated on an overly specific definition of "addiction."
If you look more broadly, the number of prime age men not in the labor force was 3% in 1955, and ~6% in 1976, and 11.4% in 2022.
For millennial men specifically, about 14% at age 25 aren't in the labor force, versus 7% of Baby Boomer men at the same age.
The difference between 2000 and 2016 in men aged 21-30 who were NEET's (not in employment or education) was 8% back then and 15% now, and this is specifically lower than the trend for their older confreres over the same time period.
Erik Hurst notes in a 2021 economic paper (Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men) about this trend "During the period 2004-15, approximately 60 percent of the 2.3 hours of increased leisure time per week for young men was spent playing video games, while younger women and older men and women spent negligible extra leisure time in this way."
We also all know that college enrollment for men is down relative to women, and continues to trend downwards.
I agree that it's not wholly video games, porn is almost certainly a part of it too, along with the usual free time sponges like Netflix, Tik Tok etc.
But I think you can point to a fairly strong and worrisome overall trend of "when young men get endless porn and video games and other easily accessed superstimuli, a decent chunk of them will opt out of the struggle to achieve in favor of these easier comforts".
Sure, it's not 100% of them - but 10-15% is quite a large enough effect size for me to play it safe. We spend similar amounts of time / effort demonizing smoking, which has about the same prevalence, and probably a *smaller* overall effect on all cause mortality than being an unemployed man and lowering your lifetime earnings significantly.
My perspective is anecdotal and personal. I value the written word and can remember books that I read 40 years ago, and the impact they still have on me. I think reading develops empathy, as the reader assumes the perspective of the protagonist which feels very different than the mindset I've experienced playing games. I also love learning through reading nonfiction which, again, feels drastically different. My kids have friends who choose to stay inside on their consoles rather than ride their bikes to the beach. The experiences feel so different to me that I cannot help but believe that the impact on kids is different too.
I was mentally comparing books more to movies than games.
They say that Shakespeare's work are meant to be performed, rather than read. If that is true, which is better, to read Shakespeare, or to watch a Shakespeare movie?
"I also love learning through reading nonfiction" some people learn from good documentaries.
If we must discuss games, there are many types of games. I grew up playing Monkey Island and similar "graphic adventure" games. Those were wordy narrative games, completely different in nature from the reflex-based games you probably have in mind.
Another type of games are strategy games which require a lot of thinking on the player's part and that have no reflex-based component.
The book equivalent of a video game is a choose-your-own-adventure book. I grew up reading a lot of those. Recently I've seen bits of playthroughs of the "visual novel" game Slay the Princess. It's essentially a choose-your-own-adventure book on screen, with beautiful drawings and voice acting added to the textual component. These "visual novels" are today the most common type of wordy narrative videogame, having dethroned the graphic adventures I grew up with.
"My kids have friends who choose to stay inside on their consoles rather than ride their bikes to the beach" I agree that staying inside is very different from physical activity outside. However, reading is one of the activities you do when you stay inside, and belongs to the same group as watching movies or playing games.
I live sandwiched between a river and a canal. They're lovely, but there's lots of opportunities for drowning. About once a month a young man (usually drunk and aged 19-22) drowns in it at night. Presumably it's not children because their parents are preventing them from engaging in dangerous behaviour around rivers and once young men become adults the safety is off.
We play video games instead. You can't drown if you're playing a video game! (They do also get plenty of supervised outdoor time. We walked 3.5 miles today, to the outdoor pool plus some exploring).
I work as a teacher for some after-school programs at my local school. I'm not even allowed to let the kids go to the bathroom by themselves. I have to instruct them to take another kid with them for "safety." The bathroom isn't even in another building or anything. This is apparently a universal rule according to my employer.
The problem isn't just that helicopter parenting is impractical and costly but that it keeps escalating.
My personal theory is that this is the real reason that fertility drops with women's education. It's not because educated women are more selfish. It's exactly the opposite. Women use their more rights to do helicopter parenting.
Helicopter parenting is largely a phenomenon pushed by women peers. Most men don't police their friend's parenting skills. This is largely a women thing. Perhaps people's individual experience is different from what I'm describing here.
> Most men don't police their friend's parenting skills. This is largely a women thing.
Yes. Although in my bubble, most women also don't police other people's parenting skills. (Maybe that's because when they do, we simply stop spending time with them.)
"I'm not even allowed to let the kids go to the bathroom by themselves. I have to instruct them to take another kid with them for "safety."
Wow. I have never heard of that. I can only imagine it is an over-reaction of caution on the part of the school administration from terror of being sued by some angry and litigious parent about "you let my little Johnny go to the bathroom on his own and he slipped and fell and broke his tooth" (which in turn will drive up insurance premiums even higher).
I mean, back in the days when I was going to primary school, a neighbour's kid *did* slip and fall in the bathroom and break a tooth, but there was no notion of "we must immediately sue everyone in sight" about this back then.
Kids are a joy until they turn 13 and start on the road to becoming like us. I grew up in the 60's and we felt safe and wandered everywhere. Living spaces were more homogenous, we were expected to and read books, and Sundays were not like the rest of the week. Perfect world? Hardly, but definitions were sharper, "one size" didn't fit all. The speed of change has accelerated to the point of barely being able to evaluate what just happened before the next thing does. In an only a couple of generations moorings are lost, the past is dismissed as a failure. Very difficult to discern what kind of world we are leaving to the future when we barely function in the one we are living in. I could say, "Start with the Classics, the Greeks and Romans," but that pretty much falls on deaf ears these days. Our trappings have changed, but we still fear the dark and the unknown. And we all end up dead. Strange, but there are days that's a rather comforting thought. Sorry if I've offended anyone. Not. Ha, ha.
14 is the worst age. I was a screaming fury when I turned 14 (hard to imagine, I know!) I was quiet up till then, and when I got into my middle and late teens it was better, but for some reason 14 was the worst year when everything went sideways.
I have two well-paying jobs (this blog and my psychiatry practice). My wife lost her job a few months before becoming pregnant and decided not to immediately look for a new one in the middle of pregnancy, and later, in the middle of child-rearing (especially given what the programmer job market looks like right now).
She also seems better at it than I am, and I'm not 100% sure she would trust me to do too much more of it. I also suspect she's gotten angry that people bother her for being a stay-at-home mom and might keep doing it out of stubbornness just to annoy those people.
Quite similar dynamics in our house. I'm also much better at dealing with the chronic sleep-deprivation than my husband, which is perhaps biologically influenced.
There are a few interesting studies, e.g.:
"Females’ reaction to sleep deprivation, characterized by reduced risky choices and increased egoism compared to males, may be related to intrinsic psychological gender differences, such as in the way men and women weigh up probabilities in their decision-making, and/or to the different neurofunctional substrate of their decision-making." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4368427/
My guess, fwiw, is that a lot of the panic you feel (which I also feel) is related to some amount sleep deprivation, which makes having a busy/tedious schedule much much harder.
If his wife is happy with it and it suits them both, why not? Some people are happier being stay-at-home moms, some people are better suited to be house husbands. I think the twins' mother can indicate if she wants to go out to work and express if this arrangement doesn't work for her, since I can't see Scott doing the "I am the head of this household, you must submit me to me!" thing.
Screens. My kids are addicted to theirs since their first fire-tablet. My son (now 10) learnt English mostly by youtube-videos (minecraft et al). The youngest (2.5) is asking me often for "lingo" or "kanakekid" - but why should I deny him duolingo-for-kids or khan-academy-kids?!? (except that I need my phone, sometimes - and he often manages to switch to youtube AND to send my boss voice-mails!).
But then, we were glued to the few kids-shows on TV in 1977 - and we did go outside and played with the kids (oh, there were so many of them in the 80 yards around our flat!!! Now: none, same park-corner. The playground 100 yards away still has a few.). Oh, range: Here in Europe, those US-cops seem unreal. GO for that orange t-shirt-plan! And still, our kids have less range than they used to. I walked around unsupervised with my pal when we were 4 - when we still lived in the city-centre. And I heard in villages during farm-work, the small kids would be put under a tree. On leashes. Longer than the ones on daycare-kids I saw in NYC. Legit, it seems. If people have just one kid, sure they must go mad. Lucky you got twins. Time to go for a couple more. ;) Us subscribers adore Kai and Lyra (whatever their real names are).
"Adolescence": Yep, no own smart-phone for my kids till ... 16. Or 14? Dumb-phone: sure (so they do not have a good reason to ask for an evil one).
If you feel overwhelmed by childcare and you can hire a good nanny/babysitter, then you should definitely do it.
I think one can uncouple the love they feel for their particular child from "how much do I enjoy doing this kind of thing?" There's a huge range in the amt of enjoyment people get from spending time with kids of particular age groups. I love toddlers and kids up through age 12. After age 12 it's child-dependent (although I'll note that my friends' teenagers are terrific). For infants I'm not related to, I will read them a book and chat with them, but I'm probably checking the clock out of the corner of my eye.
Likewise, there are all kinds of jobs other people seek out that would be very hard for me. I would find them stressful, uncomfortable, boring, or pointless.
I haven't read Caplan's book but ever since I heard of it I've been wondering...does he address the effect of pregnancy on women's lives and bodies? Is he an advocate for surrogacy?
Maybe it's not that The Ancients let their children roam more than we do ours (I'm a father of a 3yr old), but that they thought that children were fundamentally more robust and whose feelings were less worthy of consideration.
To illustrate, take Scott's kids-on-the-table example. If they aren't going to be watched they can't be on the table. So what if they want to, they don't know what to want and are bad at thinking. If they tantrum, so what? Insert earplugs and let them figure it out. I do this with my kid and he always recovers, and we always play later, and he seems to still like me.
If you think of children as small adults, then you will want to respect their wishes and ameliorate their pain. This is perhaps noble, but very very hard because, as illustrated, their wishes are bad (I of course don't mean wishes for things like food, water, love. You must provide those unconditionally.) and their pain is extremely explosive and irrational (though also short lived). On the other hand, if you think children need to be told what to think and how to feel, and that they're robust and can get over things unscarred, you have a lot more leeway for action and control. All those sentences certainly sound very trad.
Of course this logic breaks down eventually as they age. You should probably not 'count to three' with a teenager, and certainly never with an adult. But at three I think it's sensible, or maybe I'm just an asshole.
“Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds?“
Older kids.
The acceptable age for baby sitting is rising and the number of siblings is falling so this strategy employed by larger families is largely impossible now.
Source: Oldest of six kids who spent a lot of time wrangling his younger siblings. I was probably baby sitting my younger siblings at like 9 or 10 for a few hours unsupervised.
At 36, I’m old enough I watched safetyism take over, as my next brother and I were free range and rode a mile to/from school at ages 7 and 5, but my younger siblings were chauffeured. My mom didn’t get more scared, but I think she followed the crowd.
Also I have a 9-month old and I think you simply made the mistake of having two babies at once, not any over parenting.
I became a dad a couple of months before you. It’s completely understandable, I think, to be overwhelmed and exhausted by raising toddler twins. You aren’t doing anything wrong, and it is indeed hard. If Caplan doesn’t think it is hard, he is an outlier and I’m not sure you need to worry about it.
But the fear that your kids won’t turn out to be successful in life unless you shuttle them around activities and drive yourself crazy…you can let go of that I think. And maybe Caplan’s book is more useful for addressing anxieties of that sort, which mostly come up when kids leave the toddler stage anyway.
Kudos on the babysitter. Without daycare, my wife and I would be screwed.
Basically there is so much variation in the infant - toddler stages that if any one parent tells you they aren’t stressed while you yourself are freaking out, odds are to me that they have an idiosyncratic situation that you can’t easily replicate on your end.
I think either that's defined as decreasing intelligence (in which case it's just repeating these results without explaining them) or is sometimes explained by dysgenics (differential reproduction of lower-IQ people) in which case it's way too slow to produce any effect observable on the time scale of a decade.
Twins are definitely an outlier in terms of care - one child (even at one) can be corralled and managed, but two that you keep together (rightfully so!) will definitely require a lot more continuous oversight. Probably for a few years because as they grow they’ll start to conspire to find ways to avoid oversight.
In general, I think Caplan is right about over-parenting - it doesn’t seem to pay any dividends in terms of the success for the child, makes you miserable, and may make the child struggle more on being independent.
In traditional societies almost all childrearing is "secondary". Babies are held or watched over by various caregivers, who rarely give them exclusive attention. When they're a bit older, older siblings or cousins accompany the younger kids more while parents work, do chores, or gossip.
This feels good to increase at the margins in modern families. With my friends with multiple kids, the first-borns tend to be raised in a weird, over-stimulating, constant-parental-attention environment, which feels a little unhealthy. When younger siblings are born, all the children are afforded a healthier degree of neglect and learn to play by themselves.
Just a guess, but perhaps your first kids being twins means that you feel the need and pressure to give both kids attention, and you haven't undergone the triage process that a younger sibling forces upon you.
I expect Scott to follow-up with an addendum on how sibling care works - surprised that wasn't in the study, but maybe there are other, obvious ways and means in the past that we don't naturally consider because of other changes. The Little House on the Prairie, for example, has the same `go outside and play' approach albeit with a different set of dangers!
A small tip from a disease ecologist and a parent of a toddler in daycare. You have two years of them being sick about 50% of the time and infecting everyone. Your only choice is whether you prefer this to happen when they're in daycare or kindergarten.
My wife has done some bio-related work and claims that kids' immune systems improve significantly around five, and if you can hold out until then the pain is a lot less.
I did some more research. With the caveat that I don't research human diseases (or even mammals), I think there are a few separate aspects to consider for daycare vs kindergarten.
1) Chances of infection
2) Severity of disease
3) Chances of transmission to family members
1) The cumulative disease burden for children dacare vs kindergarten seems similar. This is what I meant in my initial comment. Everyone gets one or two rounds of the same childhood diseases until you develop adaptive immunity.
2) Your wife is correct. Kindergarten age children have more mature immune systems that handle infections better. I'll spare you a wave of citations on this one, but RSV, flu, ear infections, rotations, etc. are all less severe in older children.
3) This is harder to quantify with a few quick searches. Also, we're working with averages here and damn near every immune response, disease burden and shedding rate I have worked with is gamma distributed and the extremes can matter a lot for transmission and resistance. Young kids seem to transmit SARS-CoV-2 more readily and this probably generalizes. If you have a household member that catches everything, the difference between older and younger kids may not matter.
A crazy thing is that sometimes around age 50 to 55 I stopped having colds/flus several times per year. When I was a young man in my 30-something prime, I was debilitated by an infection about four weeks per year. Today, in my dotage, I feel under the weather for a few days per year.
It seems to me that the important thing isn't your kids' chances of being kidnapped while playing outside unsupervised, but the chances that something equally bad would happen to them while doing something else. What are kids today doing instead of walking around by themselves? They're being driven somewhere (39,345 fatalities last year according to https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813710, although I don't know how many of those were children), or they're in a building (198 kids under 14 died in home fires in 2024 according to https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/civilian-fatalities?startDate=2024-01-01&endDate=2024-12-31&searchChildren=1), or they're under the supervision of a trusted adult (most child kidnappings and murders are committed by someone the victims knows; I'm not bothering to cite a source since it's in the article). There's no such thing as a risk-free situation, so why worry about strangers more than other potential killers?
> This method identified stepparents as parents about half the time but did not identify other parental figures as parents (e.g., Grandparents).
So it would seem that the source can not account for the decline of the extended family or for the falling number of children (specifically older siblings) that could take over certain parenting responsibilities. Parents spend more time parenting not necessarily because the workload has increased, but because it's no longer being shared among the family.
Several months back we noticed that our toddler was starting to demand TV time way more than we were comfortable with. So we told him that we were limiting TV to three days a week. We let him choose the days (he picked Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday...with a little gentle nudging from us).
After about a week he had totally accepted the new reality and his TV viewing habits plummeted.
It isn't just that he has fewer opportunities to watch TV. He's become less interested in taking advantage of the opportunities that he does have. He frequently ignores Wednesday TV day, even if we remind him. That is partly due to the weather getting nicer and having more opportunities to go outside, but this started even back when it was still cold and ugly out.
A big reason I think this worked is that we gave him (bounded) agency to choose which days he wanted to watch TV. So when he asked if he could watch TV on a Thursday, we said no and reminded him that it was his choice. This didn't eliminate the struggle when transitioning to the new regime, but I think it helped.
All kids are different, so YMMV. But I think the general strategy of putting a gated fence up around super stimuli, and giving your children some sense of agency in when they get to open the gate, can be effective.
This is really interesting. I think you're right that this is a classic YMMV kind of technique, but in cases like yours where it works it's an incredibly wholesome win-win. We're right at the boundary of how much TV feels comfortable, and occasionally wander over it, so we might be giving this a try!
I find all concerns about screens to be completely overblown and almost exactly the same as my parents' generation's worries about TV. I have a 5yo. She's had a phone since she was 2. It bores her often (even with algorithmically-recommended Youtube content!) and she's happy to put it down whenever there is anything fun to do. She also goes to preschool, takes jiu jitsu, and has gymnastics lessons, and has never once displayed any kind of phone withdrawal or anything from any of her activities. Watching shows or playing games on her phone is just one of many fun activities, and it's not even her favorite one.
The thing to remember about kids is that the best way to make them ferociously desire something is to tell them they can't have it. Let them have all they want and they at least have an opportunity to develop self-regulating skills. We did the same thing with candy. My 5yo gets all the candy she wants, whenever she wants. She has like 1-2 pieces of candy per day, and sometimes forgets about it for days at a time, because it's just not a special or exotic thing to her.
Quoting teachers whining about kids being "phone zombies' or "unable to read Colson Whitehead" always make me laugh. In my adult life, I probably read more than at least 90% of the country. I never once read one of my assigned books in high school unless I could fit it in during class or study hall. Assigned reading is boring! And of course teachers love it when staring at the wall is the only alternative to listening to their boring lectures. In my day, I had to sneak a book under my desk to avoid dying from boredom. By all accounts, Bryan Caplan's kids are extremely well educated, due in large part to their absence from traditional schools with their "I speak you listen" style of education.
The teacher quoted seemingly teaches at a college. Of course college students are worse now! Way more people are going to college (~50% of HS graduates in 1980, ~68% by 2010)! That necessarily means that either the population has gotten significantly smarter (unlikely) or dumber kids are enrolling in college.
Do you realize that most people who use cocaine use it responsibly, just for fun every once in a while, right? The idea that everyone who uses cocaine is an addict is drug warrior propaganda
ADHD, as well as many kinds of other mental health issues seems pretty overrepresented in here.
I went on sertraline for OCD and I have become massively more easily bored with the internet ever since. And in general, I can just like, sit and be idle without constant stimulation and distraction now, it's insane.
> I had to sneak a book under my desk to avoid dying from boredom.
Heh, school reading not just bored, but actually enraged me, so I began writing my own stories during classes in high school :) That actually proved to be the whole extent of my teenage rebellion. And before that, I remember spending some Literature classes writing a QuickBasic program, a text adventure I called "Castle of Horrors". So many if's & goto's...
I was an early "screen kid" in that respect that I had a computer (a ZX Spectrum) at home since age of 6, and I really wanted nothing to do with "the outside". I'm sure my parents would be happier if I roamed a little, but I never wanted to. And when I spent summers in the country, without computer access, all I did was inventing tabletop games that tried to replicate computer games to play with my only friend (his mother, a former professional skier, and wife of Olympic team ski trainer, forcibly kicked us out of the house sometimes to play outside; I think she thought I was a bad influence on her son).
On a personal level I have the luxury to spend a LOT of time with my young children, and although I don't love doing it (it's often tedious and all-consuming) I sort of feel a moral imperative to do it, and absolutely do not regret not going the day-care/nanny way.
When all is said and done, one doesn't get to spend a lot of time with their child, especially once they enter school. I feel like it's important for my life satisfaction, and hopefully theirs, to know that I did my utmost to spend whatever time I could muster with them.
This sounds like exactly my situation, and is exactly how I feel about it - although also, thankfully, the older they get, the more fun / less draining it is, I am finding. So I guess it's self-congratulatory to say, but you're absolutely doing the right thing!
I think-- having six kids between the ages of 5 and 14, all with some level of special needs-- that one thing it's very hard to measure is the drain of mental load when engaged in primary care. Thirty minutes of feeding and changing an infant do not feel the same as thirty minutes of trying to play a game with a toddler (while keeping them physically safe, teaching them social skills like turn taking, staying engaged in a game that's mind-numbingly boring to you and exciting to them) and neither are the same as talking for thirty minutes with a thirteen year old about a video game or book or their own world-events anxiety.
Throw in twins (which I also have) and the physical and mental load involved in infant and toddler care is even heavier. It's so difficult to tease apart how much of this is inherent to a certain age of child, how much is socially-conditioned pressure/expectations we put on ourselves as parents, how much is poor understanding of child development from lack of experience (ie the worry load of not knowing what's normal and what isn't), and how much is the absence/presence of the mythical village. We can build a village via nannies and sitters and friends, if we don't have one out of family and neighbors-- but that requires work and money and developing relational trust. We say people used to have a village, but that's also dependent on culture and location and economic status, etc. In short, it's always more complicated than it looks (it's hard to gather completely accurate, unbiased data that accounts for everything) while simultaneously being simpler than it looks (caring for dependent humans has always been hard on some level).
These thoughts aren't a rebuttal to anything, just things I thought of while reading this. In an adjacent vein to that book and the topic of physical roaming, I think you'd really enjoy Michael Bond's book "Here and There," especially the early chapters about childhood freedom to roam and the impact that has on brain development and anxiety. It covers some similar concerns you mentioned here without being preachy about what we OUGHT to do, as if we have clear answers. It's made me think a lot about the ways I provide my kids with space/freedom to explore and engage with environment without getting the police called on us for neglect-- a constant concern when living in town and in close proximity to well-meaning strangers.
>"This has expanded into a broader principle: don’t let toddlers know a superstimulus exists if you’re not prepared to fight them about whether they get to have it all the time."
I initially really liked this rule. My hesitancy is: what isn't a super stimulus in today's environment? Anything better than playing with sticks and mud? My fallback advice is even more general: pick your battles. Children are aggressive invading armies, but as the general of the defensive forces you can pick the setting and time for your battles.
I've certainly noticed my kids having the freakout over wanting to watch phones. But there are lots of other things I've also had to fight them on not having all the time, or exactly right now when they want it. Including but not limited to: aardvarks (old school tv show Arthur), bacon, baths, blankets (in the washer), bubbles, candy, cards, chalk, coins, crayons, etc. I'm gonna stop there before I end up alphabetically listing everything in my house.
I think phones are possibly getting a uniquely large share of the blame for what amounts to a bunch of different superstimulus activities all rolled into one package. You can be socializing, reading a book, watching funny videos, ordering super delicious food, and playing games all on your phone. From the outside it all looks the same though.
The parenting angle here is that even superstimuli can get boring for people eventually. I've seen my daughter voluntarily put down watching videos on the phone to go play with baby dolls (we got to this point when both of us were sick with covid and barely able to stay awake, much less parent). It took about 3 hours though. So maybe we can just worry less about the superstimuli.
Your first list of examples are normal for your toddlers to ridiculously fight you over. None of them are superstimuli; it's just toddlers being grabby. With your list of possible phone activities, yes, you can identify different categories of activities, but does it matter? We all know what 99% of phone time is population-wide, and it's not reading books.
I'm glad your daughter is holding up well against the threat, almost certainly due to high quality parenting leading up to those encouraging examples you're seeing, but the threat is extremely real. Get some up-close time with a kid who has been raised from infancy on Instagram Reels and I guarantee you will change your mind.
There was a discussion in the comment section on /r/petfree about whether babies and toddlers should be barred from indoor public spaces, unless explicitly marked as child friendly.
Here's a great reason why they absolutely should not be barred from such places. Parenting becomes a lot more enjoyable when you can do normal things, like go to a restaurant, brewery, or grocery store, with your kids in tow. And that makes life better for everyone.
Your life is going to change as a parent, but that doesn't mean you have to give up all the pre-kid things you enjoy. Go out into the world with your kids. If they make a scene, do your best to get it under control. If you just can't get it under control, then maybe you'll have to pivot and change your plans. But dust yourself off and try again. If people sneer at you, sneer back with a sense of moral superiority because you're in the right here.
My freshman year of high school, I went to a small school where every student was given an iPad on which to keep our textbook and take notes.
As you can probably imagine, this led to a lot of goofing off. But my key insight as a 13/14 year old is that while the teachers came down hard on the kids clearly playing video games, they didn't bother those of us reading dense text on it, even if in retrospect it was probably pretty obvious that I was paying 0% attention to the class. Somehow I found SSC and over the course of the school year worked my way through its entire corpus.
...and then ended up being an atheist vegan EA, much to my Catholic parents' disappointment. Brainrot is inevitable and the wheel keeps turning.
"When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies." That's the *actual* kicker, ain't it? The trick isn't that less hours of parenting should be done, it's that you should outsource (some of) your parenting. We can extrapolate this: "If something you think is mandatory stresses you out, figure out how to outsource it" can apply to parenting, housecleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, driving....
Of course, this form of outsourcing is only advice for people wealthy enough to pay for it. I'm struggling with this right now honestly: I *could* afford to hire help I guess, but things keep happening lately (Microsoft's layoff the other day that included highly technically accomplished engineers being a recent top-of-mind example) that make me more and more reluctant to spend money that freely.
TL;DR: Since daycares need a low ratio of staff to kids, even the cheapest possible daycare is going to be pretty expensive. (That ratio is required by law, but even without laws, there are only so many babies one human can take care of at once.)
Thanks for linking that excellent post. Now I want to see a daycare in California advertising "we have an unlocked liquor cabinet and don't wash our hands after changing diapers, but at least we don't have tuberculosis!"
Humor aside, that all squares with how I think about daycare. Simultaneously way too expensive, but would also make me feel like I'm criminally mistreating the workers just by using it.
I had to laugh at Caplan there. Not to get all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but for the first fifteen years of my life I lived in a country area four miles outside our town. That doesn't *sound* like a lot, but it is when your family only has one car and your father needs that for work so it's gone all day.
Until I was seven, we didn't have running water (and we only got that because the farmers in the area needed water for their dairy cattle, went in on a group water scheme, and we were allowed join in on the line). How did we manage for water before that? Walked to the pump in a field (another farmer's field) with buckets every day, and my father got a milk churn which he filled up with water for the day. Want to wash or use hot water? Boil a kettle or heat a large pot on the cooker.
We didn't get an indoor toilet and bathroom until I was twelve. Want to bathe? Boil a kettle, do the Dolly Parton Wash* in a basin** or keep filling the plastic bath tub in the kitchen once a week for the weekly bath. How did we manage for lavatory facilities? Let's not get into that, just mention "chamber pots" and that I helped my father dig the septic tank when I was around nine when he converted an old shed into an outside toilet (after every flush we refilled the tank by bucket with rain water collected in a barrel).
My mother looked after herself, my father, her bedridden mother, and eventually four children up until we moved into town when I was fifteen under these conditions (gradually improving over the years, as I said).
I remember my mother *hand washing* clothes in a plastic bath outside. I could go on, but I think you get the gist.
After that "you have to spend more than an hour at a time with your kids? just hire another nanny!" - well, that does certainly sound like First World Problems 😁
* “People have often asked me how we girls managed any privacy in a house with so many boys and no private rooms. It was difficult. We used to bathe with a washcloth from a pan of water. We would first start with our necks and faces and wash down as far as possible. Then we would wash the road dust from our feet and wash up as far as possible. Later, when the boys were out of the room, we would wash “possible.”
** Ours was a plain plastic wash basin, but I grew up referring to "wash hand stands" because that's what I heard them called and older houses still had the likes of these (not as elaborate):
Was this pretty normal in your area, or were your parents following a different drummer as would usually be the case with such a recitation, if from anyone in America under say 65?
Oh, this was normal. I often say I had a perfectly ordinary 19th century upbringing 😀 For whatever reason (probably money) the county council had not extended the water supply outside the town, so everyone was getting their water from pumps, wells, or springs. When my mother wanted a proper bath, she would go into town to her nephew's house.
The neighbours and family members scattered over the area were living in similar 'council cottages' with similar needs for getting their water from their own sources. For some elderly relatives, they were still cooking on open fires (sometimes in addition to having gas cookers) up until the 1980s:
The funny/ironic thing was that due to the Rural Electrification Scheme of the 1940s. electricity supply was finally rolled out to rural areas, so we had electricity but no running water or sewerage!
"We can extrapolate this: "If something you think is mandatory stresses you out, figure out how to outsource it" can apply to parenting, housecleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, driving...."
My youngest is a few months younger than your twins, and I can confirm that there is not much you can do to make an active baby/toddler less work besides "have someone else to do some of it."
In re: free range -- no, it absolutely works and does not require you to let your kid scroll algorithmically curated short-form video indefinitely. But you can't be twenty ticks more free range than everyone around you: if there are no kids in your neighborhood, or the only kids are obsessively surveilled (perhaps because you live in an area full of homeless drug addicts that most people don't consider a safe environment for unsupervised children), people will call the police. If you live in a neighborhood full of twelve-year-olds riding their bikes or e-scooters to the library, sports, or friends' houses, you're much less likely to get a second glance when your eight-year-old is walking to the ice cream shop. First ring suburbs (many of which are now incorporated in official cities!) are often the best places for kid-walkability.
I was thinking very similarly (parent of an adventurous three year old). Like I aspire to have a more 'free range' kid, but it only seems feasible to be at the top of the range of 'normal' for my area, not recreating the freedoms kids 100 years ago had.
> Don’t run yourself ragged rushing your kids to gymnastics classes they don’t even like.
Over-scheduling is a trope, and yeah it's a thing but tends to happen much later than the toddler years.
My quibble is that at this age you will be tired whether you have a planned activity or not, since kids demand your engagement and attention. They don't solo play *that* much yet. If they can get by with less of you, it's only because there are other adults or older siblings around. Factoring that a) our families are no longer gigantic, b) the grandparents don't hover around always if ever, c) the default at leisure is no longer intermingling with extended family (or friends with kids), then all of that falls on you. I'm sympathetic to the idea that environmental factors like multi-generational housing and cultural expectation of grandparents can boost fertility, as well as living very close to either friends with kids or relatives.
Here in the burbs, fleets of kids cycling around is a common sight, usually above 9 years old. I could foresee younger ones being part of this so long as there are enough older kids.
Twins are just a whole other ballgame. I speak from experience; our other kids could do things like go fishing at age 2 and we NEVER tried that with our twins together at that age. The trouble is that there's always someone else at the same developmental stage to reinforce whatever idea one gets. So instead of an older sibling who would be grossed out by emptying training potties all over the floor, or a younger sibling who isn't capable of joining in the fun of climbing onto the fridge, you get someone whose reaction to it all is "Brilliant! I'm in!" I always said the theme song of my twins was "You've got the brawn, I've got the brains, let's make lots of money" because one had the muscle to, for example, right the kitchen chairs we'd overturned so they couldn't climb, and one had the idea to get her twin to right them and then the agility to do the climbing. If there was something I actually had to get done, like a phone call or cooking, I would pay for it by cleaning up the disaster afterwards. Every. Time. (And this was with three older siblings for those twins. But you can only lean on a 9 year-old so much and I didn't want her to never have her own kids after feeling like she'd spent her childhood raising siblings.)
Mine are 10 now and it's fine. But it's just incredibly hard with multiples for about the first 5 years, sorry. It's not you, it's them. But twins are still great and I'm kind of sorry we didn't get another set, only another singleton.
Kind of reminds me of all the dumb things I did in high school. Kids all hanging around other kids the same age, learning how to behave from other X year olds, is maybe not the best way to do things.
I think you forgot one point Bryan makes which is crucial: the first year really is overwhelming (and I am sure twins add significant work). But it passes. Bryan emphasizes we shouldn't evaluate the entire thing based on one year alone.
Just to add some random anecdotal thoughts to the 'teachers are freaking out' point.
I work in a school (UK) and it's obvious that something has changed with kids mental health - or possibly with their parents' assessment of it - in the last decade or so. The trend started before Covid and has significantly increased since. I don't have exact data but speaking from personal experience:
- We now get far more requests from parents in the run up to their child joining school that they
need to be in classes with friend X or away from enemy Y. They will offer letters from doctors saying that it's vital to their child's mental health. I'd say this has about doubled in 10 years.
- We have to make many times more accommodations to students for them to sit standardized tests, this has especially skyrocketed since Covid. The number who have some kind of significant mental health struggle with taking a 90 minute exam has gone from c2-3% 10 years ago to 15-20% now. 10 years ago it was very rare to have anyone in a cohort who was too mentally unwell to take any exams at all: last couple of years it's 1-2%. This is different from those who just can't be bothered to turn up, which has remained about constant.
- I see statistics that show no significant rise in suicides (here in UK at least), and that's a relief. But it definitely feels like there's been a rise in threats or talks about suicide. I've seen parents email in: 'my child says he'll kill himself unless he can give up <subject>'; 'every time she has a class with <teacher> she self harms afterwards: you need to do something'.
There used to be a semi-joking trope that when you asked a student to do anything they didn't want to they'd reply 'it's against my rights'. Now it would be (more likely from the parent) 'you're not meeting my/their needs'.
I think it's both that the mental health has suffered, and people have also realized that "mental health" are the magic words to force people to do what you want.
(This has, in turn, made genuine mental health worse as people "fake it until they make it".)
FWIW - the difficulty of twins, relative to two small children of different ages, start to invert around 2 years. That is, I, as a two-under-two mom with a friend whose twins were the same age as my oldest, started to be envious of her situation when they were around 2 years old.
“ Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.”
One of the tricks is older siblings. Part B of this trick is living close to a house full of older cousins. The kids were sent outside in packs and the older siblings/cousins collectively had to “watch” them. This meant a range of things depending on those older siblings/cousins interests and ethics.
Not sure why the researchers haven’t looked at this. They may have forgotten or not known about it. It seems weird to people who didn’t experience it. Anecdata primarily from 1950s, bit from 1980s. I knew one older sibling doing tremendous daily babysitting for younger siblings in about 1990 due mainly to the death of their mother but this person was in an unusual situation at that point rather than it being the norm.
Stories about what the older kids made them do or let them do is a wilting genre. Some of those older cousins/siblings had a “high tolerance for physical risk” but I think less tolerance for disobedience. I didn’t read the recent NYT about how siblings “shape us” but I think there was a time when they ran the show away from home.
You may be able to recreate something like this with the house of rationalist “cousins” next door. Not sure.
"Older kids" is absolutely the trick in question, it's a big effect with my youngest & I can easily imagine a community of kids making it even more effective.
Agree with other commentators that a big part is just your kids are still young - I noticed a big shift in how fun things were at ~18 months, and once the 2nd got to 18 months and could play more cooperatively with the older one there was a huge shift in how easy things were ("huh you guys are just happily playing with each other...I guess I'll go clean the Kitchen? cool?")
The immune systems definitely make things a bit harder - part of what helps me wife out is she just has so many other mom groups she can hang out at where the kids run around and the moms talk with each other. This might be harder to find in SF though.
I think the dynamic of playing with each other also encourages more kids. It's fun to see how my two kids interact with each other and us. Once we have another kid the possible relationship graph to see will expand significantly more than 20%, and so on from there.
This book had a huge influence on me when we had our first kid 13 years ago. Well, maybe not so huge since we decided to stop at two. But, our reasons for that were more about being introverts than about kids being difficult (maybe having a house full of people when we need a disproportianate amount of alone time isn’t a good plan). I haven’t read the book for a long time, but it put me on the path to some other lessons that I thought might be worth sharing.
1. Enjoy your kids for who they are right now. A lot of parenting advice – society in general – is focused on making sure they “turn out ok.” Worrying too much about making “mistakes” sucks all the joy out of being a parent. Kids are funny and weird as well as high-maintenance. Remember to enjoy the good parts.
2. There’s a cottage industry of fear-mongering about the “critical 1-3 years.” So many of our peers believed they had one chance to get it right – and if you messed it up your kids were doomed for life. Outside of extremes of abuse or neglect (I’d also make special carve outs for extremely poor nutrition and the horrible “kid friendly” adware garbage on phones and tablets), I think most of those worries aren’t justified.
3. Many of our peers got into attachment parenting. I’m not going to open that cesspool debate, but I will say it’s a very high-impact way to parent that subverts almost everything in your life to ensure the kids don’t wind up like Romanian orphans. If you really love the idea of a family bed and breastfeeding until the kid decides they’re ready to stop, then go for it. But, the idea that NOT doing these things will result in developmental issues is just false. Do what works for your family.
4. We also knew a lot of parents who just assumed they would keep up with softball/rock climbing/“the band” – and are horrified when it just doesn’t work. I guess I am not sure what to say. Your life is going to change when you bring more people into it. There’s a fare amount of dragging them along with you that works (we bought a boat when both of our kids were still in diapers), but thinking your life isn’t going to change and then being shocked and disappointed when it does – and then bitching about it on social media – seems like a weird approach.
5. One day, my wife was standing in line at a coffee shop having a kind of soft-complaining conversations about all the things we were juggling. An older guy in line kind of smiled and shrugged and said, “don’t wish your life away.” We’ve tried to remember that every time things get hard.
I feel like an extremely effective charity from the viewpoint of pronatalism would be providing pro-bono legal services to parents who get in trouble due to letting their children play outside. I could not find any such organization that currently exists, and I’m not sure why not. The only reason I can think of is perhaps lawyers are wary of accidentally representing parents who are actually abusing their children, but I feel like you can just fire your client if that turns out to be the case.
I tended, past tense, towards getting very sick. Sending kids to daycare came with a real crappy intro period as I was constantly sick. But that also seems to have trained up my immune system and now I mostly just don't get sick anymore. Talk to anyone that works with kids and you'll hear a similar story.
Kids may less be able to tell that the superstimuli are actually understimulating, and make good choices in regards to that. More and more people I know are reevaluating their relationship with social media towards using it less.
I tend to think more and more that humans have good built-in systems to stop when they've reached some threshold of pleasure (like when eating steak, watching a movie, etc) but that as we discovered more and more stuff we discovered stuff that can bypass these systems on a few points.
It's like, when eating steaks you fill the "eating savory food" but also "having some micronutrients" and also other stuff. Doritos (to take the example from the article) may fill the "eating savory food" without the micronutrients so you're left wanting more.
Same for algorithmic content in the way "the algorithm" serves it to you, but also in the way it's made (lots of shorts are made to make you want more, and try to give a bit of fulfillment, but mostly make you want more, kind of like a bad mystery novel). Clickbait is like that too, it piques your curiosity in a way that's been optimized to go through your normal barriers. Lots of people are aware of clickbait, while still clicking each time.
There are also stuff that's so addictive we deny it even to adults (heroin for example), or that's heavily restricted (gambling) because we've known them for a while and know how the story goes. In fact lots of techniques to avoid spending too much time on social media/phones like leaving your phone outside your bedroom kind of looks like the restrictions we put on gambling (it may only be done in some specific places) and then when we remove those restrictions, lots of people have worse lives https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment.
>But if phones are merely very addictive - so addictive that college students scroll through social media instead of going to class - then it’s less obvious that it matters. You can’t realistically prevent your teenager from using a phone during college; if she has addictive tendencies, she’s going to get addicted. So why not save yourself some babysitting time when she’s three years old by letting her go on Toddler Instagram?
Maybe some way to approach it is, how would I deal with raising my kid in a country where opium is legal? Or, how did parents approach smoking when it was legal everywhere, if they didn't want their kids to smoke? Did the parents trying to prevent their kids from becoming addicted to smoking helped the kids live better lives?
I am nineteen (and grew up in a wealthy suburb in the US) so I think I probably have more anecdotes about growing up with or without screens than most commenters here.
I received a smartphone in fourth grade because I began to be expected to walk home from school with my sister (half a mile) by myself and text my mother (who was then working again) that I had made it home safely. However, this phone had very locked-down parental permissions, so I couldn't download any apps and it was not interesting to me until I was thirteen. At this time I was only allowed to spend ten minutes a day playing games on the computer.
In around third grade I received a chromebook to do my schoolwork. For reasons I can't remember, I wasn't very motivated to browse the internet by myself at this time. I do remember that many of my classmates were playing computer games and that my sister got in trouble with our parents for spending too much time reading the Minecraft wiki.
I was never allowed to watch TV of any kind, and only rarely allowed to watch child-appropriate movies. I believe that this may be the reason I still can't watch movies or TV. I struggle to understand what is going on in a scene visually, who is talking, etc, especially with animated movies or television. I do have sensory processing issues and this might be part of it.
At around thirteen I got a second chromebook for home use and ended up actually being online. I joined Tumblr at this time and made my first online friends. This made me more interested in my phone because I could message my online friends through the web. I also started taking pictures with my phone around this time (though I had a digital camera beforehand). I had some bad outcomes from this but I think they were almost entirely because my parents are kind of terrible. If they had treated me like a person who deserved respect I could have asked for help with those problems more often.
(Side note: your kids will almost certainly go on the internet and pursue interests you think are stupid. Commit to never ever making fun of their interests not even a little bit. The worst online-related experiences I've had were with not-quite-abusive-but-very-horrible online friendships and romantic relationships which I could not ever tell my parents about. I was certain they would have made fun of me instead of supporting me, or possibly have taken my internet access, because these relationships were built in the context of fandom and online roleplaying. You would like your children to be comfortable telling you that the person they write fanfiction / do Tiktok trends with is being unacceptably cruel to them.
You should also not make fun of things your children do on the internet, or if you must at least don't tell them you're doing it. When I was six and would say something that sounded silly to adult ears my mother would post it to Facebook immediately while laughing at me and despite the fact that now as an adult I'm sure it was in fact cute and silly, it made me feel very rejected because I was not joking.)
Many of my classmates in high school had younger siblings who they thought had unacceptable access to technology. A very common theme among my classmates when we had this discussion was "the medium amount of TV as a child and full internet access I had in middle school was fine for me and I turned out okay, but my nine-year-old brother is addicted to mobile games".
I really chafed against parental restrictions on my phone (though again, this is mostly because my parents are terrible and I had reasonable fear that they would mock me for wanting to do any given thing) but I definitely think that children younger than I don't know, about twelve, should not be able to download any app they want and *really* should not be able to pay for things on their phone. When you eventually give your kids a phone, double check this. Some of my classmates' younger siblings spent several hundred dollars on mobile games before their parents realized this had happened.
I wandered into whatever part of the internet gets me here, and Tumblr, and Tumblr was the way I learned I was transgender, so I guess in some sense you could attribute my gender to the internet but I definitely remember feeling intense physical dysphoria before I was online. I am also mentally ill but I remember being mentally ill before going online. I was raised in a liberal atheist family and have continued to be a liberal atheist. I mostly agree with my parents on politics except that I am pro-polyamory, think that I should be allowed to physically transition, and have more nuanced thoughts on mental illness and homeless people. I have just finished a successful freshman year as a college student.
I think if you want your kid to have reasonable opinions, being willing to have respectful debate with them and trying to see their perspective is important, and not making them afraid to tell you anything they are interested or thinking about is very important. (I cannot overstate how much of my bad relationship with my parents comes from them mocking me for my interests being childish. I think this is an underrated failure mode in parenting.)
On the whole, I think the appropriate age to be able to use a smartphone is probably around twelve or thirteen. (Possibly younger & with more locked-down permissions if you think it will be helpful to your kid to be able to call you-- maybe this has implications for free-range parenting.) Being allowed image- and video-based social media is worse than being allowed a web browser or to text friends or something. I nearly ended up using Instagram compulsively but I didn't have it until recently and I was able to conquer that partially because I knew I had more important things to do and partially because I was used to doing sliightly more intellectually stimulating things on my phone. Highly recommend trying to get your kid to read ebooks on their smartphone when they eventually get one-- when I end up doing something mindless on my phone, the majority of the time I default to "reread a book", which I think is straightforwardly better than having your default be social media.
> I was never allowed to watch TV of any kind, and only rarely allowed to watch child-appropriate movies. I believe that this may be the reason I still can't watch movies or TV. I struggle to understand what is going on in a scene visually, who is talking, etc, especially with animated movies or television. I do have sensory processing issues and this might be part of it.
Anecdata: I was also raised without TV, and I also have a difficult time watching movies and TV – I tend to find any unpleasant themes in video media way more emotionally intense than books about similar topics.
Anecdote, but this is one of those situations where neighborhood matters a lot. I live in an area that's primarily single family homes owned by people with kids and a tight knit community. The area is bounded on one side by a creek and the other by a parkway. With those barriers it's relatively easy to give my kids free range, knowing that there's a broad set of other parents out there and clear boundaries to stay within.
> Deaths from homicide are up slightly, but realistically it doesn’t matter given how rare homicides were to begin with (and most child homicide victims are unfortunately killed by family members).
one has to wonder whether the increased child homicide rate might be _because_ many children are now spending more time either at home or at the home of a relative, and hence closer to the very people they are at risk from.
Regarding smartphones, this recent firsthand writeup by a high school teacher was interesting because it is a before/after comparison: the school decided to flat-out ban student phones inside the building. They had some false starts on making that effective, but did finally get there starting with this school year.
I haven't read this book, and I am jealous you have a nanny. That said, twins is definitely one of the hard modes of parenting, so you should NOT feel guilty about being overwhelmed. We have Irish twins, and having two small children whose nap schedules are not fully synchronized, who are not capable of playing with each other without accidentally maiming one another, who egg each other on with whining and jealousy, and who (as they get older) are capable of cooperation ONLY when it comes to pulling off intricate Ocean's Eleven-style heists* to get past security measures is a whole different ballgame than taking care of a 6-month-old while your 4-year-old looks at a picture book in another room.
Yes, you can relax and let them watch something pre-approved on Netflix for a while. Yes, if you ignore their whining they will eventually figure out how to entertain themselves with their own toys. But small children close together in age are hard to deal with.
*Seriously, now that they are 3 and 4, they can manage to have one child set up a distraction while the other one uses a broom to open a hook-and-eye latch at the top of a locked door.
I hear you. I have 7yo twins. When they were that age, they were insane. Just so exhausting. I spent 100% of my awake non-work time on childcare. My wife was full time mom and I don’t know how she survived. But now they are amazing! They will happily play on their own or read for a good chunk of the day.
Also, our subsequent kids (ages 2 and 4) have been way easier and more enjoyable because a) they came one at a time and b) the older twins help. For example, this morning I was up early with the insane 2yo, and couldn’t do anything but watch him. But my 7yo boy woke up and decided to just play with the 2yo for an hour while I worked out.
But yeah I would constantly read these statistics about parenting and searched frantically for what we were doing wrong. We weren’t doing anything wrong. Twin toddlers are just insane.
Our twins were in the NICU with a set of triplets so we got to know the parents. With twins, having two parents and two arms, etc. made is seem like a fair fight... whenever we were wiped out, I'd think about the triplets.
The flip side is that as a parent of twins I would often look at parents of singletons who complained of exhaustion and think, what do you even have to do?
I have a question about the general sort of argument that Caplan is making. I haven't read his book, so if he answers it, just let me know! If not, I'm curious how people might address it.
The magic of science is that you can come up with reliable, often counterintuitive results through controlled processes. But they are *controlled* processes, which means that if you remove the controls you have to wonder if the results are still good. In this specific case:
Caplan (as I understand it) points to studies where parents did more or less active parenting and showed that it didn't make a difference, and more broadly to studies showing that parental involvement doesn't make a big difference in outcomes. But given how common beliefs in the other direction are, all of those studies were presumably done on parents who *thought* that what they were doing would make a big difference. And presumably this affected what they did—all of those who did less (and avoided bad outcomes) presumably worried and made sure they didn't go over the line to too much less, for instance. Which is to say, that it's entirely possible that the results Caplan points to *only* hold under the conditions that parents *don't* think they're true—that is, that parental outcomes don't make much difference *if* parents are convinced of the contrary!
Now, you might say that this is ridiculous and counterintuitive. But then, the idea *that parental involvement doesn't matter* is pretty counterintuitive for most people. We will believe it's true if there are studies showing it is true. But if those studies are done under a specific condition (parents believing the contrary), then can you extrapolate them without that condition?
I guess what I'm saying here is that once you're playing the science game, you can't really rely on intuition, "well of course THAT does/doesn't make a difference!". The power of science is its repeatability and reliability; but its specificity is its weakness. Either you are relying on studies in the face of general beliefs—in which case this *specific* issue, does parental involvement matter *if parents believe it doesn't*—hasn't been studied; or you are relying on your general sense of what is plausible, in which case of *course* parental involvement matters! I don't see how you can have it both ways.
FWIW, this is about half a real concern—I can imagine that parents who don't think parental involvement matters, or matters much, doing radically less and thereby going farther than any parent who thought it mattered did & achieving outcomes in ways that were not studied—and half a theoretical concern that seems to me to apply to a lot of social science in particular (in the hard sciences, the specific conditions come up more regularly, or can be made to, but in social sciences our beliefs & practices are influenced by the new ideas which means we are never working under the conditions that we've studied!)
I would love to hear what people think about this.
I find it sort of shocking that Kaplan admits to having nannies, when for this system to work, it must be workable for most people, who cannot afford nannies. Similarly with the ever-increasing cost of daycare.
On the stimulus question, I'll say (anecdotally and unscientifically) that I've found that having slightly luddite tendencies has been of the foundations of my intellectual development; I was the last person I knew to get a cellphone (not till college, when all my high school peers had them) and the last to get a smartphone (not until 5 years after college, in late 2016). Having a smartphone has absolutely reduced the amount I read books or do non-smartphone things with my downtime, even if I don't spend extensive time on it in one go. This is not self-congratulatory (clearly, I was just following my own weird predispositions) but I say this as distinct from saying "I don't find this technology addictive" - I absolutely do! I just view being addicted to it as very bad, and go out of my way to avoid it and judge myself for it, in the way that some people do for using heroin, and that conviction helps stave it off.
I think part of the underlying issue isn't just the addictiveness of the screens, but the *complete cultural normalcy* of that addictiveness - when a kid doesn't become a screen-addict, they are overtly cutting themselves off from their peers, something that no kid who isn't autistic wants to do.
Just a minor remark, the Roman Empire probably did not collapse in 476, that was just the date of another event in the really slow fade-away. Bret Devereaux (acoup.blog) has an excellent three-part series on it.
1) I also worry about how much time we spend with our daughter, and am often overwhelmed. The exhaustion isn't from hard work, it's just that toddlers don't have any sense of restraint in demanding your attention and time. Fielding constant demands is tiring, even (especially?) from someone you like a lot and are inclined to accommodate.
2) I too intended to avoid being one of "those parents" and I absolutely am. There's so many fewer degrees of freedom on the parenting axis than it initially appears. Two-year-olds can't go outside and play for hours, and if they wanted to we have fewer kids available to play with than our parents.
I've seen suggestions that the secret to less parenting is group effort and community - kids run in packs and the parents do too, with one of the benefits being only one parent in the group needs to be "on duty" at a given time.
3) I do think our measures of happiness are super flawed. I'm not sure if parenthood produces more hedons than dolors or whatever. A lot of days I'm wiped and annoyed. But I'm certain that seeing the slimy potato I met a few years ago become a human being is a better kind of joy than sleeping in or eating a good cheeseburger. I don't think this is unique to childcare, but I do think it has its basis in productivity and social connection. In utility terms, I think maybe it's a feeling that's more consistently accessible or that I can be more confident is available in the future? Like if tomorrow my house burns down and my identity gets stolen, and I lose both my legs, a good cheeseburger won't cheer me up much, but I'll still have helped raise a kid.
4) I was very worried about screen addiction because I have an addictive personality (and a screen addiction tbh). My two-year-old is so stimulus sensitive that she avoids the TV on principle. She hates smartphone speakers. She'd prefer it if there were fewer trucks. And birds. I think personality is a bigger factor here than I initially gave credit for. But I will not be allowing social media until she's mid-teens at the earliest. I'm also trying to wind down my social media use in the face of *gestures broadly at the tech world right now.*
Excellent points, really well put. My experience absolutely backs up #2: being part of a group of adults all partially taking care of multiple toddlers is easier than the same amount of time solo-caring for a single toddler.
And I agree with 3: it would be good for society as a whole to think more in that direction. What you're describing, I definitely feel. You don't get nearly as many in-the-moment feelgood spikes you could get from living the childfree good life, but - higher baseline on the hedonic treadmill, I guess you'd call it?
I didn’t find the arguments in the book compelling. First of all, when you are spending hours and hours on childcare, it doesn’t feel that great to hear that it isn’t very important. But also, if you are arguing against common behavior there is a very large burden to overcome that the usual approach is right and you are wrong. It’s a wisdom of crowds thing. For example, kidnapping is rare, but kids used to walk to school by themselves and bike a lot by themselves. Kids getting hit by cars and bike accidents is still unlikely but the outcome is horrible that in expected value terms, coddling kids starts to make sense.
I think the book kind of clashes with free market mindset that people know what they are doing. If people are spending hours and hours with kids, there must be a reason for it. It would be like saying people are dumb to want nice houses and cars and things. Sure there are some academic studies that says time spent with kids isn’t that important, but by now we should know to put approximately zero trust in those results.
I certainly agree that there's no point rushing your kids to gymnastics classes they don't even like. But I have some arguments against the idea that parenting doesn't make much difference to later-life outcomes:
1. Opportunities are heavily mediated by parenting. If my parents chose to raise me in a less developed country, I would've had a very different life. If my parents not ensured that I had abundant access to books and the internet, we might not be having this discussion. If my parents did not ensure I socialized with other children often, I suspect that I would today be relatively less socially confident or capable. Additionally, I explicitly and consciously modeled a lot of my social behaviors after my parents—particularly my dad, who is a very charming person, and my mom, who is a very assertive and no-nonsense person. At the very least, most gymnastics champions had parents who brought them to gymnastics regularly and at a young age.
2. Health interventions have compounding effects. Because my parents were relatively understanding about mental health (especially for Asian parents) I went to therapy as a highschooler and got diagnosed with ADHD before starting college. Both of those events have had long-lasting effects on my life, and will continue to do so. You can imagine similar effects caused by vaccination, nutritional quality, avoiding toxic substances (like lead or maybe microplastics), etc.
3. I am a proponent of attachment styles as proposed by attachment theory, just from sheer personal experience (my priors on this are strong but not unbreakable). Speaking with my friends and partner and meeting their parents can explain a LOT of personality variation and how they go about handling their relationships, and this holds true even for people who are adopted (including my partner!) If nothing else, I believe that parental warmth and consistency is very important.
4. Parents can teach their children learnable skills. We know that there are learnable skills that can have long-lasting effects on people's quality of life: gratitude, emotional regulation via CBT, meditation, etc. I learned some of these from my parents. For example, my mother was big into meditation, and it has had a long-lasting effect on me. When meditation became a big thing in the West, I already had experience in some of the Eastern traditions and realized that I had a leg up because of it; I'd never known how much it improved my quality of life until I read about the supposed benefits and realized I already possessed many of them.
5. Traumatic experiences and abuse pretty undeniably shape people's futures. I suppose you could make the case that good parenting is thus avoiding particularly bad practices, and no "good" practices provide anything of worth. Even if that is the case, I would still consider that to be important.
I'm consistently frustrated when it comes to these discussions of screen time for kids: why is it always framed as "I either give them unfettered access to the modern, attention sapping algo-monster, or nothing at all."
Parental controls are pretty good these days. And even if you don't trust them, then there's no reason you need to. You can easily lock down a tablet so all it has on it is Sesame Street and educational games. I realize this gets harder to enforce as the kids get older, but I'm always baffled when the screen time discussion assumes all activity on a screen is equally poisonous, as if LEDs magically rot your brain. Unlimited AI slop on YouTube Kids could certainly kill a kid's attention, but you can't convince me sitting them down with Breath of the Wild or Bluey for a couple of hours would have even close to the same effect.
If you're doing this kind of thing, you probably should include a notes app, a drawing app, some office software, a bunch of e-books you're ok with, any manuals which aren't relevant to breaking the parental controls, a bunch of inoffensive pretty pictures (maybe a folder of desktop wallpapers, maybe family photos, maybe Wikimedia Commons featured images), et cetera.
Nobody is worried about their kids spending too much time reading manuals or taking notes or playing around in PowerPoint, and these things can be fun if you are a bored child. I loved exploring the filesystem and using KidPix and GraphicConverter and making Office documents with five fonts and a bunch of colors and clipart when I was a kid.
As soon as our kids were able to understand the directive, the rule was always, you can have screens if you can stop using them when we ask you to without a tantrum. It worked well enough up to about 12. After that - I still confiscate the 14 year old's phone regularly.
I (born 1981, UK) was fairly free-range when I was a kid. I allowed my kids to be, and even did the thing of kicking them out of the house (we live in gated estates in China, so they can play inside the complex with no danger from cars). I was surprised by how little interest they had in being out. In retrospect, there are a couple of features of my childhood that encouraged me out of the house:
Dog - I was allowed to walk the dog solo from a pretty young age, and that was a treat.
Friends nearby that I could call on.
Living in apartments, I was never willing to get a dog. Just seemed cruel. And Chinese parents don't believe in play, only endless classes, so our kids would never be welcome in friends' homes.
So, it's not just whether you allow them out. It's whether you are able to create a life in which going and being outside would be an enticing thing to do.
I'm sorry you're finding it tiring... embrace the suck! Playing with small kids is genuinely tedious, but also profound and life-enhancing and builds a great and lasting bond. Do it as much as you can, know that it's enough, and be relaxed when you can't face it any more!
I thought the same thing. My parents were both young children/born in the 60s and the sense I have from their stories is they were just kind of left to their own devices and not in a good way.
To the extent that I can recall my childhood in the late 1960s, yeah, that's about right.
In particular the parenting books, or book singular. My mother was the youngest sibling in a large family, so had little experience looking after younger children. Or in how a more typical 2.3-child family would operate. By her own account, she read Spock(*), said "that sounds right; I'll just do that", and basically did just that.
My brother and I turned out reasonably well, so that's probably where I'd start if I were raising kids.
It gets better at 2, and much better at 3, but yeah, the first few years do kinda suck, or at least, they suck up a lot of time (babies are still adorable!).
That seems to be Caplan's report, and I imagine his wife might have a different recollection. If Caplan is counting only 'direct interaction' such as "physically fed the child" that might be reducing it way down to "one hour a day" (e.g. maybe the nanny fed the child, changed nappies) but unless Mrs. Caplan was outside the house at a day job all day, she would still have had interaction with the young children more than that.
Well, that or they emulated 19th to early 20th century upper-middle to upper class English childrearing practices.
From Hilaire Belloc's "Talking (and Singing) of the Nordic Man":
"The Nordic Man is born either in the West End of London or in a pleasant country house, standing in its own park-like grounds. That is the general rule; he is, however, sometimes born in a parsonage and rather more frequently in a Deanery or a Bishop’s Palace, or a Canon’s house in a Close. Some of this type have been born in North Oxford; but none (that I can discover) in the provincial manufacturing towns, and certainly none east of Charing Cross or south of the river.
The Nordic Man has a nurse to look after him while he is a baby, and she has another domestic at her service. He has a night and a day nursery, and he is full of amusing little tricks which endear him to his parents as he grows through babyhood to childhood.
Towards the age of ten or eleven, the Nordic Man goes to a preparatory school, the headmaster of which is greatly trusted by the Nordic Man’s parents, especially by the Nordic Man’s mother. He early learns to Play the Game, and is also grounded in the elements of Good Form, possibly the Classics and even, exceptionally, some modern tongue. He plays football and cricket; usually, but not always, he is taught to swim.
Thence the Nordic Man proceeds to what is called a Public School, where he stays till he is about eighteen. He then goes either to Oxford or Cambridge, or into the Army. He does not stay long in the Army; while from the University he proceeds either to a profession (such as the Bar, or writing advertisements) or to residence upon his estate. This last he can only do if his father dies early."
Two more reasons college students might not be able to read-- this is from stuff I've read rather than experienced, so you're taking your chances.
30 years of whole language teaching which was telling children to look at the first letter and guess at the word.
More recently, a teaching style which demanded extreme accuracy in reading paragraphs, but never taught whole narratives or encouraged any sort of immersion.
I note that these are somewhat opposite to each other-- a child exposed to the first couldn't function at all with the second.
I don't think whole language teaching is the problem, because many of the stories I hear are at top colleges, and I assume at top colleges everyone can do the very basic word-identification task that whole language and phonics compete to help with.
I actually think the biggest hack is having your children do labor. We're terrified of "parentification" today, but kids want to be helpful, and they want to play with other kids. Have them be helpful, at least to the point that they are "net neutral" to household tidying, as soon as possible. And if you have a whole mess of kids close together in age, they will want to play with each other as much as (or more) than play with you.
It genuinely works, so long as you don't try to hold yourself to the same standards as people over-parenting one child. You take the kids to the park and let them play, and then you just accept you might get a nasty look from another parent every once in a while, if you misplace a kid or if that parent feels like they need to help your child on a ladder (that they already know how to climb).
Kids don't want to be responsible for the behavior of other kids if not given tools to control that behavior. If you want a kid to supervise a sibling, you need to be ready for them to run to you about any issues, or delegate them some kind of authority, and if you don't do any of that, they might make their own tools through means like hitting.
I really just care that they are responsible for telling me if someone is doing something unsafe. Otherwise, I just want them to play together.
Tbh, if I am not around, I don't really care that much how they resolve issues. We teach them not to hit or be physical and to use words, and while I think there is probably a little shoving or shouting from time to time, it honestly doesn't come up that much. I can 90%+ of the time get a good 30-45 minutes to do a workout while they play together in the basement or watch a show.
And rightly or wrongly, having this philosophy allows me to reframe my self-oriented workout time as "good parenting" :)
It is probably true that you can't make your child happy. But I think it is certainly true that you can make your child miserable.
Move out of the stupid city and, when they are old enough, kick your kids outside for at least an hour a day. Its not a choice between parenting and phones, its a choice between maintaining your pre-kid lifestyle, and adjusting to meeting the needs of the entire family.
Your argument about the fall of Rome being associated with technological advancement doesn't make much sense. You would need to draw a line that there were specific technologies that were not inherited in the subsequent societies and that people were decrying those technologies as harmful prior to the fall. That seems like quite a tall task
I don't think I claimed that the fall of Rome was associated with technological advancement. I was using it as a metaphor for things that don't happen for a long time, then do happen.
Then it seems like kinda a pointless straw man because I don't think people making the argument that cell phones and social media are having similar impacts to books and writing are saying that something is not happening indefinitely.
I'd say people are making the argument that if you want to say there's something specially bad about technology, you need to draw a better line than a corruption of the youth or of the common man.
I recall having a conversation with a classmate a while back. We were talking about having children and he said that he was somewhat worried about ever becoming a parent: what if his child would grow up to be some kind of terrible person, for example the kind of person who thinks that poverty is the fault of poor people?
Being interested in GiveDirectly's work, I'm very far from victim-blaming poor people myself. But I remember feeling... annoyed? saddened? by this phrase. It felt very wrong. There are so many terrible things that could happen to someone as they grow, I thought — they could become a murderer, for instance. But your worry is about your child's political opinions, likely because it's the kind of people who hurt you especially on the internet. (We had not discussed politics before; it was only at that moment that I guessed his politics was left-leaning and the blaming-poor-people thing must be from some social media and [understandably] painful for him.)
I wanted to explain that the way to resolve those differences would be to talk to his child and explain to them why your opinion differs, genuinely hear them out and learn why they think what they think, and try to figure out the truth together. That on the internet, in the constant stream of nonsense, we dismiss people on the other side of the screen at a hair trigger at it, and makes sense in the context, but with your child, the context is different and they are to be perceived as a human being no matter what. And that, at any rate, the way to gain epistemological trust would be to be open to opinions, ready to share his, and prepared to figure things out together, and not to shove any truths down his child's throat.
I tried to explain some of it, a small part, but I do not feel like I did a good job.
***
I feel like this it's easier for me than for some others. I have friends from very different parts of the political spectrum, some of them would probably hate each other. Since I don't belong anywhere on that spectrum — since I don't belong with any political ideology so far — I'm free to perceive them as human beings with their sadnesses and their own kind of striving for goodness.
Still, even taking that into account, it's sad for me to see the mention of mind viruses. What if your daughter will be SJW with 7 genders? You'll have the most interesting conversations! You'll explain to her why there are obviously 9 genders (or whatever Obviously Correct Number of Genders is currently accepted). Maybe sometimes she'll think you're silly and a little old-fashioned. Okay.
What if your son will share some bitter, hateful ideology? You'll try to give him reasons not to be bitter about people, and not to hate them. Maybe you'll succeed, and maybe not. That's the case for every human being, and theirs is the road.
Regarding test score changes between birth cohorts, the issue with them is generally much more about measurement non-invariance than demographic change. I suspect that holds true for the vast majority of these sorts of comparisons and that changes usually reflect differences in test-related knowledge, test-taking methods, and so on, rather than shifts in underlying ability.
The population just isn't super malleable, so large, real shifts seems unrealistic to me, and when the data is there to analyze appropriately, measurement non-invariance tends to be the dominant reason for changes.
Can you explain the difference between test-related knowledge and underlying ability (I understand we're not talking about IQ changes, but does this rule out that kids are too phone-addicted to study and so don't have as much test-related knowledge?)
Underlying ability is raw smarts, intelligence, what the tests are supposed to measure.
Test-related knowledge is something required for the the test to showcase your underlying ability. For example, a reading comprehension test will not showcase the underlying ability of individuals who were never taught to read. We have an empirical example of exactly this limiting factor masking the intelligence of a pair of separated-at-birth twins in 20th-century England: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1818894384198279369
There are plenty of other examples like this too. For example, if you randomly selected some people in a group to teach matrix rules and then administer a battery of tests including matrix tests to the whole group, the ones who received the training will appear to do much better. This will be for reasons we can ascertain are due to the bias induced by having different test-related knowledge conditional on a given level of underlying ability, as we've experimentally altered the levels of test-related knowledge without respect to ability.
What I've found does not rule out that the cause of the changes in test-related knowledge are things like phones, failures to study, etc. They absolutely could be, and that test-related knowledge could be very important for later life outcomes, too, even if those deficits don't come with deficits in underlying ability (although in every case where I have data to test, test-related knowledge doesn't have independent predictive power).
I know that all children are different, and my children aren't twins (I have two, spaced 20 months apart), also I've probably got lucky with my children's temperament but I think the closest I have to "one weird trick to make parenting easier" is to just do the jobs you have to do anyway, but with kids.
Going to the supermarket with kids is barely harder than going to the supermarket without kids. Whereas sitting down and reading a book near your kids is _much_ harder than sitting down and reading out of sight of children.
If you don't have jobs that need doing, putting them somewhere pretty babyproof, and keeping an ear out has worked well. Our eldest was very good at beating babyproofing, but there are systems you can get the require a magnet to unlock, and you can keep the magnet somewhere high up.
Regarding studies on the evolution of time spent by parents caring for children from the 1960s to today, I find it hard to believe that one could produce something truly reliable on this subject.
That being said, it's always better to rely on studies rather than nothing, and I don't doubt that we spend more time with children today. The reason seems obvious to me: the status of children has evolved significantly since ancient times and even since the 1960s. They are increasingly considered as full-fledged individuals. Society places much more importance on children. Laws and jurisprudence have also evolved in this direction.
This evolution has many factors but comes particularly from the fact that infant mortality was very high in the past. Children were half-alive beings. Death hovered above them like a Damocles sword. One shouldn't become too attached because what the Lord had given, he could take back. I believe that among the Romans, children weren't even given an official name until they had survived their first few years. [Edit: Overstatement. Nine days for males. But infant mortality there was a slow and progressive recognition as a person or citizen across years.].
It seems to me that if we allow children to wander less freely, or if we not only put seatbelts on them but also install them in secured seats, it's exactly for this reason. In the past, risk tolerance was much higher since, generally speaking, everything was riskier. Mortality was much higher at all ages, particularly in childhood, and this across all causes. "Women and children first" at one time apparently meant they should face death first (and not be rescued first). [Edit : sorry it appears to be a false debunking]
There is indeed a certain chicken-and-egg paradox, but I still think that the decrease in mortality thanks to hygiene, nutrition, and medicine has caused a paradigm shift where an adult's life has become more precious than before, and a child's life even more so.
But personally, if I spend time with my children, even if it's sometimes difficult, it's because I'm very interested in them. Everyone sets their priorities where they wish, but I find this to be a very good reason to devote time to them.
Moreover, I haven't read the book, but I find it hard to accept the idea that there would be no long-term benefit to all this attention given, this time spent, this care provided. I maintain the hope of making my children better people thanks to what I will have given them, and I'm speaking here especially about intellectual and moral values more than anything else. Success in material matters comes second.
"Women and children first" at one time apparently meant they should face death first (and not be rescued first)."
I must look that up, because on the face of it, it sounds like one of those popular debunkings which are in fact incorrect and the original meaning is the right one.
"I believe that among the Romans, children weren't even given an official name until they had survived their first few years."
That's another one I had to look up; I have a vague recollection that it differed in different cultures (e.g. in China children had a 'milk name' for early years before getting an official name). Best I can find on short notice is Wikipedia:
"The praenomen was a true personal name, chosen by a child's parents, and bestowed on the dies lustricus, or "day of lustration", a ritual purification performed on the eighth day after the birth of a girl, or the ninth day after the birth of a boy.
The nomen gentilicium (or simply nomen) was a hereditary name borne by the peoples of Roman Italy and later by the citizens of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. It was originally the name of one's gens (family or clan) by patrilineal descent. However, as Rome expanded its frontiers and non-Roman peoples were progressively granted citizenship and concomitant nomen, the latter lost its value in indicating patrilineal ancestry.
For men, the nomen was the middle of the tria nomina ("three names"), after the praenomen and before the cognomen. For women, the nomen was often the only name used until the late Republic. For example, three members of gens Julia were Gaius Julius Caesar and his sisters Julia Major and Julia Minor ("Julia the elder" and "Julia the younger").
A cognomen was the third name of a citizen of ancient Rome, under Roman naming conventions. Initially, it was a nickname, but lost that purpose when it became hereditary. Hereditary cognomina were used to augment the second name, the nomen gentilicium (the family name, or clan name), in order to identify a particular branch within a family or family within a clan."
So nothing there about waiting "years" to give the child a name. However, full legal recognition took place over such a period. Fuller treatment here:
"In ancient Rome, babies weren’t considered fully human upon birth. They gained humanity over time until they could walk and talk, the process beginning with their naming a few days after birth, and later when they cut teeth and could eat solid food.
...Once a child reached its first birthday it could have legal privileges and the parents could apply for it to have full Roman citizenship. Three years was viewed as the threshold to the next stage, but we would have been surprised at what was expected from children in the lower social classes even before such a tender age. Epitaphs and reliefs on graves show tiny children at work in mines or laundries, and some children could already have been practising spinning techniques as toddlers."
Thanks for the checking. I should have done it before posting. Sorry for that. The first seems indeed a false debunking, and the second an overstatement.
However, on the substance, it's a fact that children have traditionally had a status very different from what it has recently become.
>What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds? They can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they? Or maybe everyone else’s one-year-olds can, and mine can’t?
I think having the baby in a safe area where you don't need to constantly watch them would count. E.g., you're in the kitchen making lunch but you can see into the living room where the baby is playing, and you can periodically look up and make sure she's not escaping. Or you're doing something on your laptop while they're just playing around your ankles and not being too disruptive.
I have definitely considered these things, but it's a hard problem. If I try to restrict my children in a safe area while I go somewhere else, they bang on the gate and scream until I let them out. If I try to use a laptop while they play at my ankles, they climb up me and try to grab the laptop and bang on the keys.
Every time I sit down to write at my computer within 60 seconds my 3 year old will start climbing on the back of my chair, then situate herself on my shoulders. Followed by my 6 year old who will now remember the computer exists and ask if we can play Minecraft together.
It's frustrating, but at the same time isn't it great to be so loved?
I wrote down some reflections on the phone/superstimulus question a while ago. I agree it's lazy to resolve it by saying it must be like previous moral panics, but I'm not sold it's as bad as many say.
Also, Calvin preferred spending time in front of the TV and was often kicked out by his mom. I think learning impulse control and learning to like more refined things is one of the things we do as kids (and some do it better than others). Parents impose some consistent structure until this happens and then kids can learn within those constraints. You don't have to ban table time, but you can keep to a rule of only three jumps etc.
Screen time and attention problems confounded by genetics, possibly no link
In this cohort study of 4262 pediatric participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, genetic confounding accounted for much of the association between screen time and attention problems and part of the association with internalizing problems in the model using molecular-based heritability. In models using twin-based heritability, genetic confounding fully explained both associations.
I grew up mostly in a fairly primitive area, and yes: parenting was extremely minimal compared to how it is here, but I don't think you can replicate the effect.
We didn't have screens because there was one phone within 4 hours walking distance, so we would wake up, eat, there would our would not be some mandatory chores (clean the floor, husk the rice in the pillon, pic through beans, feed the chickens, all the various agricultural tasks that don't exist here), and then it was time to fuck off into the forest or the town square for the rest of the day.
We could come back for lunch (which was what was left of yesterday's dinner) as we pleased, but if you showed up to anybodies house they would probably feed you, we had to put in our hours in school but it was all grades at once in a two room building, so it was very short (though those who were interested started learning some pretty hard math at seven or eight because that's what the seventeen or eighteen year olds were doing), and we had to put in our time with god on sunday, even if anyone under the age of 40 being sincerely passionate about religion was looked on as a sort of semi-mental illness.
Didn't you have better things to do? Church for 20 year olds is for suffering in, not having spiritual experiences. That something those weird evangelicals who live in the commune on the mountain do.
Finally, after a long day of climbing trees and shrimping and carving elaborate tracks in cliff sides for hot wheels and getting into mild fistfights over perceived sportsmanship violations, you would come back for dinner, get mildly reprimanded if you got too dirty, do evening chores, then go to sleep.
I don't see how an American who doesn't live well and truly in the sticks could replicate this effect. Where would you even go to find a creek you could shrimp in that wasn't full of glyphosate?
I actually Laughed out loud when I got to the end of your free range kids letter:
"PS: We are rich and extremely litigious."
Love the idea of bright orange shirts, it is shocking even in a 'good' neighborhood how many people will complain that you let your kids have some independent freedom.
My wife asks me almost every day "what are we doing wrong?" We have a one-year-old in daycare and we both work full time. It is exhausting and it is easy to feel like other parents have some shortcut we don't know about when they're still alive after having a kid or two or three. Thank you very much for sharing that you're exhausted too!
For us, our kids didn't come pre-loaded with any useful software. The final features we needed for a minimum viable product didn't arrive on OTA updates until around 5 years old. Those first few years are tough, but once you download "feeds itself", "dresses itself", and "potty training" (for us it was about 6 months after, when they didn't need to carry around extra pants/undies/socks for frequent accidents) the stress levels go down a LOT. When you don't have to bring a stroller and a bag everywhere, you can go places so much easier.
Later, when you have one old enough to babysit (built-in childcare) your relationship with your spouse becomes more spontaneous again. In the meantime, I strongly recommend creating a date night routine that's sacrosanct and using flowers for spontaneity. We offset childcare costs during this period by partnering with another couple, whose date night sanctity we defended/supported as strongly as our own.
It doesn't have to suck, but this situation isn't the new normal forever. It'll pass.
You're not doing anything wrong. One is just the hardest age - they're mobile enough to break things and hurt themselves without constant supervision, they have short attention spans, they're bad sleepers, they teethe and cry and they can't be told or taught anything. All of that changes sometime between 2 and 3 and it feels like waking up from a strange dream. Then it just gets easier and more fun from there (in my experience).
We like the free range parenting laws in our state. Still, I sometimes get parents bringing my child home because he was running about "unsupervised". When I was a kid, most of my play was unsupervised and unstructured! That didn't mean I couldn't get ahold of my parents when I needed to, just that I mostly didn't need to.
One problem with outside play is that there aren't as many kids out there to play with. Maybe this is partly because people are having fewer kids. Maybe it's partly because those kids are on a screen, instead of outside. Maybe I just need to force the kids outside more to make it happen?
Last week we noticed the kids were getting a bit more rude/intolerant of one another. So we pulled screens for a week. After some initial grumbling (short-lived after we told them we were thinking of a two-week abstention, but we'd see whether one week was enough), the result was they were nicer, played outside more, and explored the neighborhood. Two of them discovered they could run to Target and play video games there, but honestly I'm not too worried about that. (Because they couldn't save on the demos, they talked about games they wanted - or no longer wanted - to buy, so Target's strategy seems to have worked there.) The next day they found something else to do.
They like it outside. They like playing Legos. They draw more, and my 12yo decided to try his hand at writing a novel. I hear you thinking, "Sounds like the simpler solution is to give them less screen time in general. If they're doing so much more with no screen time, surely your problem isn't that you're giving them any screen time, it's just that you've been giving them too much!"
Maybe? They normally get 1-2 hours a day, except nothing on Thursdays or Sundays, or any other day that it's not convenient, or when they don't do their chores. So normally they get 1-2 hours 3 days a week. Definitely <10 hours/week. So why the big change between some and no screen time? I think it's because when they're not on screens they're often thinking about or focused on them. If we give the kids too much time on screens, their behavior suffers and we have to take a trip to the park, or go on a hike or something active.
I wonder if part of the "soccer mom" over scheduling phenomenon is parents trying to get their kids to normalize post screen time withdrawals? The team sport is needed to balance the alone time with the screen. Dump the screen and maybe they'll play in the woods all in their own.
Most of this applies to older kids and not one year olds. When my kids were <5yo, we taught them to just be bored sometimes. It's a skill they should learn. Maybe in the era of smartphones it's obsolete, like learning cursive. But it probably won't hurt them to learn it anyway.
The discussion of screens seems to suffer from some black and white thinking, where the only options are no screens, or giving a kid full access to everything a phone can provide, including all the brain rot algorithm stuff. This is a false dilemma. It is quite possible to park your kid in front of a screen while you do something, while occasionally monitoring them to make sure they don't get into anything stupid.
My 2-year old watches a lot of TV. Often she watches enough of it that she gets bored and plays while it's on, I try to let her watch it a lot so she considers it something normal and not something special that she needs to make extra effort to seek out. I let her put in requests, but try to limit her to things that I don't think are algorithmic brain rot. She watches a lot of Bluey, Sesame Street, Pokemon, and 1930s Disney cartoons. The only YouTube she's allowed is old Sesame Street episodes and Ms Rachel.
I also have a tablet I let her play with. PBS kids has an app with lots of educational games she can play. She is not allowed any dumb freemium games. The tablet is also useful if she wants to watch Bluey right now, but my wife and I are using the main TV. I tend to keep the tablet half charged so that the battery life will stop her from playing on it too much.
This works well. I can get stuff done while she is distracted, but don't have to worry too much about her brain rotting. I do have to monitor her a little to make sure the screen stays on something worthwhile, but mostly it's fine. She's learned a lot from what she watches, I am constantly amazed when she knows a word my wife and I don't remember using or reading to her.
I actually did get my hands on a copy of changing rhythms of American family Life for just this! I can confirm that they only counted focused/primary child care as child care, so cooking while keeping an ear on the kids did not count. The craziest thing is that women 50 years ago spent 30 plus hours a week on housework like cooking and cleaning! Now that everybody is working, married women spend the same time on housework as single moms, which is about half as much as before.
For me the best ways to do child care as a secondary activity or in a less overwhelming way is to build or bring them to an enclosed space where they can do pretty much whatever they want relatively safely, like a playground or something. And I also try to be selective about when I intervene (e.g. hitting, and even then depending on the age of the child I might instruct instead of stepping in physically, like an older child has the ability to catch a younger child's hand and prevent hitting). Often they can figure out conflicts themselves. I wish that there were more spaces built like this, for adults to do childcare as a secondary activity so that we can hang with our friends or get some work done while with the kids. Play area in a restaurant, Wi-Fi at the playground, etc.
1. It clearly presupposes parents are wealthy. "Hire more nannies" is not useful advice for those of us who are too poor to hire one nanny.
2. Caplan (and Scott) have failed to consider the risk of having a profoundly disabled child. Depending on the nature of the disability, this could prove financially ruinous or worse for the family. I know a family who has a son with severe autism. He's nonverbal, weighs close to 300 lbs, and is prone to unpredictable fits of violence. He must be supervised at all times and he's repeatedly injured his mother and little sister. Putting him in a group home is prohibitively expensive. He has absolutely ruined his parents' lives and there is a nonzero chance he will someday kill or permanently disable is little sister.
"Caplan (and Scott) have failed to consider the risk of having a profoundly disabled child."
Have they tried to give the kid up? Know in some states you can abandon babies at the firehouse no-questions-asked. I know it's a horrible thing to say but it's a horrible situation.
Their son is probably 18 or 19 at this point. He was entering puberty before they fully appreciated how difficult raising and supporting him would be. Even if they could bring themselves to give him up at that age, I'm not sure there are avenues to do so with a child that old. I know at one point they spent a small fortune ($60k iirc) just to get him in an assisted living situation for a few months so they could have a break. If there were more sustainable options, I think they would have exercised them by now.
That's just one example, I know other people who have children with serious, intractable behavior problems and it makes their lives suck. It's like being held hostage by someone you must also nuture and support.
Whatever happened to the anti-television movement? I'm slightly older than Scott but when I was a kid in the mid-80s there were still households where the parents had no TV and forbade their children from watching TV at other kids' houses, and this was seen as only a little eccentric. Culturally, opposition to TV as a crude, harmful and/or addictive activity seemed to have been very common in the 70s. I've heard lyrics criticizing TV by Zappa, Phil Collins, and The Tubes did a whole concept album on it, and the lyrics of all those songs read as if there was widespread agreement excessive TV watching is weird and unhealthy. One of the horrible vices ascribed to the children in Willy Wonka is that he watches TV too much.
What if they were right then and are still right? If you believed that TV was harmful in the 70s, what data has come in since the 70s that would've changed your mind? Culture HAS been degraded, there WAS a race to the bottom culminating in reality TV, people DID get addicted to it to the point that streaming services readily exploit them with endless serialized schlock, people read less, have worse attention spans, it pretty much all happened. It seems like the resistance died out from people just giving up rather than any rational reason to abandon their criticisms.
When I was a kid in the 2000s there were still households (like mine) where the parents had no TV and we didn't seem to end up watching TV at other people's houses (though it did occasionally come up in school).
We have no TV in our house (my wife and I are both Internet addicts but have no interest in television) and are strongly considering just not getting one and hoping our kids don't notice or care. Probably still won't help unless we also put our foot down with phones/computers.
A middle ground I think you should consider is "only tablets/computers, no phones". A laptop is much less easy to use on the go than a phone, so it doesn't reduce the risk of screen addiction of the "stay sitting around at home all day" variety, but it does drastically reduce the tendency to 'corrupt' touch-grass activities with additional Internet time on the sly. You're doing one thing *or* the other. I do this myself (I have a brick phone with ~no Internet access, and a laptop, but no smart phone) and I think it's worked wonders for my focus.
It's amusing that smartphones were my "kids these days" moment. I viscerally hate the experience of using them, small screens that are extremely inconvenient as either input or output device, tightly locked up app-store environment that hobbles your customization options at every turn, etc. Of course, the usefulness of always having a camera and being online is not to be denied, so I make do, but they definitely don't tempt me beyond the utility of mp3 player/e-book/watch in one device.
I’m still not completely convinced by the behavioral genetics argument. It often uses a heritability estimate—that is, the share of total phenotypic variation (genetic + environmental) attributed to genetics. If one assumes that genetic differences stay roughly constant while environmental influences decrease over time, it makes sense that heritability estimates would increase.
Applied here, time spent with your kids could, for example, affect their risk of developing depression. Neglecting them completely—spending zero time versus one hour per day—could clearly matter. But if you assume that after reaching some minimum threshold (say, one hour daily) additional time adds little benefit, and today’s parents on average exceed that threshold by far, it follows that we won’t observe a large parenting effect in the data (because we have little variance in the critical range where it would make a difference).
I think the survey splitting parenting time into primary and secondary is insufficiently granular.
I would split parenting time into four categories along two axes. First being active versus on-call (which are primary and secondary in the jargon of the surveys you cite), and the just as important second being work versus play.
Active work parenting is all the worst parts of parenting. It’s the midnight hours you spend trying to rock a capricious infant back to sleep. It’s the hour you spend in the morning changing your toddler’s diaper, getting her dressed, feeding her breakfast as she fights every bite, and driving her to daycare in a rush to get her there in time for you to get to work. But it’s also things you do for your child when they’re in someone else’s care, such as washing bottles, preparing meals, emptying diaper pails, and washing baby clothes.
Active play parenting is all the best parts of parenting. Reading books to a baby who is pleased as punch to see you and hear your voice. Playing peekaboo. In brief, any time you’re doing an activity with your child, and you’re both smiling.
The defining feature of on-call parenting is that you can only do things that are within earshot of your child, appropriate to do around them, and can drop on a dime to attend to your child at need. This is why I think calling it ‘secondary’ parenting is a misnomer. What you are doing is still defined and limited by your parenting responsibilities, and will not be nearly as efficient as it would be if someone else was responsible.
On-call play parenting doesn’t exist for every parent, because the leisure activities you prefer might not be an option while a baby is napping within earshot.
And on-call work parenting is functionally the same as active work, with the only difference being that you’re doing work that you would have to do whether or not you had a child.
How much time you spend on each of these, and how stressful they are, varies so widely that I have no hope that any survey could adequately measure them, but acknowledging the differences between them is a bare minimum starting point.
Re safety:
First, a 1/70,000 per year risk is not a 1/7000 per decade risk.
Second, I think there’s something to be said for the effects of urbanization and atomization on crime risk. People have more neighbors than they ever have, and are less familiar with them.
What percentage of nuclear families in 2025 know the names of everyone living within .25/.5/1/5 miles of them? How does that compare with 1960?
Re we live in a societyTM:
There are two ways that free range parenting is made difficult/impossible by the culture in which I, and presumably you live.
The first you’ve discussed, but I want to expand on. The threat of legal harassment from police/busybodies who think that what you’re doing is wrong/dangerous/illegal is enough to discourage most people from deviating from the norm. But if you’re in the middle of a custody battle with the other parent, you have to be even more on your guard.
The second is socialization. Kids need peers their own ages to develop with, and unless you can get a whole group of parents on board with your ‘turn back the clock, free range kids’ initiative, your kid is going to be the loser who plays in the woods while everyone else socializes through screens.
Also: I really hate when people say 'every generation thinks that the newfangled thing is wrong, and ruining children, and they've always been wrong'.
Because A: it's false, and B: it wouldn't be a great argument if it was true.
There were all kinds of newfangled things that *did* have terrible consequences that the stodgy old folks warned about. The sexual revolution caused the AIDS pandemic. The pro-drug movement caused the fentanyl crisis.
Even if you dismiss those, and all other examples, and the old folks have never been right once in history, that should lower your prior, but not all the way to zero.
Remember, the powered flight skeptics had literally millennia of being right before suddenly becoming *very wrong*.
> The pro-drug movement caused the fentanyl crisis.
Actually, it was the crackdown on (safe, legal) oxies that doctors legally prescribed in great numbers, addicting many, which cracking down led to a huge bump in heroin shipments after the oxies were taken away but people were still addicted.
So they cracked down on the heroin shipments, and lo and behold, it was found that fentanyl gets you the same amount of saleable opiate in 1/100 the space for 1/10 the price, after which all drug importers at every level in the US switched to fentanyl, because their interdictions went way down and their profit margins way up.
There is quite a lot of academic literature arguing that phones don't harm kids, most of which seems to be totally ignored by the academia-adjacent popularizers (e.g. Jon Haidt). The intuitive appeal of the "phones are rotting everyone's brains" seems to be too strong to overcome with data (and longtime teachers thinking Kids These Days have gotten worse isn't data, it's just the classic Kids These Days phenomenon!) Here is an article by an actual researcher trying to push back, specifically on the link between phone use and anxiety+depression in this case: https://shorturl.at/KSGUb
There's no doubt phones are addictive, btw. But so is TV, and once, so were books, and chess, etc. etc.
The internet has rotted *my* brain. These days it's hard for me to sit down and watch a tv show without also doing something else. I did not have this problem when I was a young man.
This is so interesting, because it seems like Caplan agrees with the conclusions of Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, but for completely opposite reasons.
They both want to let kids play by themselves more, but Caplan says it doesn’t matter and Haidt says it matters enormously.
I’m more inclined to agree with Haidt but I’m glad to have anyone on my side.
I've got 6 kids, so I've thought about this a lot (maybe not enough!). For context, my kids are in three waves; there are three over 25, who have jobs and health insurance ("the big kids"), two teens in high school ("the teens") and a four year old ("the lockdown baby"). These were all my wife's idea so no one need feel pity for her.
Here are some observations:
* Scott, you are at the hardest part. It gets exponentially easier, energy wise, each year. The emotional work gets harder, though. And you are so lucky to have twins (if you want two kids anyway) since you only have to go through this phase one time.
* For our toddlers we always had a living room area that was blocked off and kid safe. Maybe the entire room, or maybe I put up a kid friendly barrier that was 18inches tall. Inside were pillows and toys and I would lie there and read a book and basically ignore the kid who could not possibly hurt themselves, knew a parent was close by that they could climb on, and would give up crying when they realized I wasn't going to do anything with them anyway. I spent many evenings, and read many books, "watching" kids this way, and I heartily recommend this approach. You can set a glass of wine outside the barrier, safe from little hands, to multitask as it were.
* When the kids are older, having more of them is great. Our three big kids are great friends who spend a lot of time together (two of them share a house with one of theirs' spouse). They also step up and help with all the younger ones. Last week two of the big kids flipped a coin to see which "gets" to take one of the teens to their sleep away music camp this summer (adult chaperone required, neither Ms Spandrel or I can get away). The larger point here is that there is a sort of tipping point where having a larger number of kids leads to a big payoff in family dynamics as they get older. It also helps with the parenting, because they all step up.
* Notably, this only works in a situation/society where not everyone moves away as soon as they are adults. Our big kids all moved away for college and then work, but landed back here during covid, and stayed. I don't know how this would be replicated going forward.
* Regarding free range kids, this is, as far as I can tell, a strictly American problem. When my oldest were 2 and 4 we moved to a Scandinavian capital. It was perfectly normal to park your sleeping toddler outside the shop when you went inside. Eight year olds rode public transit alone. I had friends with 10 year olds who would take the metro to the countryside *alone*, hike into the woods *alone*, fish for a few hours *alone*, and come back home. At first I thought, oh, it's a lot safer here, but when I researched the statistics, I found the relevant crime rates (kidnapping, etc) were similar to that of US cities. That is, they were low in both places. The Scandinavians just thought that independence was more important than fear. I got very used to doing the same thing. Sadly, the first week I was back in the US (after three years away) I parked a toddler outside the store in my bike trailer and came out to find a cop standing there. I'd been reported for child neglect. Sigh. But note that if your 10 year old can take themself fishing (or skating or to the park or whatever) then you as a parent are not busy doing that.
* In the US we generally underestimate how helpful kids can be. Scott's toddlers are not helpful at this age, but if you look up Mayan parenting you'll find that 3 year olds are cleaning the house, cooking taking care of animals. They do it poorly at first, and it even makes a bit more work for the parents, but they learn fast and soon are doing stuff for you, not vice versa. Before I had any kids I was teaching at a high school in Micronesia, and one Saturday the principal took me out to see some of the island. It was us and his three kids, aged 4-8. There was only one paved road, and we were not on it, so of course we had a flat. The principal put on the parking brake and said, lets go rest in the shade. I asked about the flat and he just waved his hand, they'll do it. And yes, the kids without a word of direction put on the parking break, got out the jack, jacked the car, jumped on the lug wrench to get the nuts off, swapped on the spare and lowered the jack. They called dad over to tighten the lug nuts. We sat in the shade with warm beer and betelnut. When I expressed my amazement, dad said, "I figured if I'm going to have kids, they need to help out". I think this has been the situation historically in western culture as well, but somehow we lost track of it.
* Speaking of things we lost track of, I think richer countries have lost a great deal of collective knowledge about raising kids because a) we have fewer b) extended families have fragmented geographically and c) kids are siloed away from adults. I read an article once somewhere which made the point - plausible to me - that up until say the post war period, children were a common feature of pretty much everywhere. Fields, factories, shops, estates, streets, taverns - there were kids of all ages. So pretty much everyone had experience every day with little humans of different ages, and there was a lot of collective knowledge about how to manage them. Starting after the war this changed dramatically, with suburbs, college, geographic mobility - suddenly it was all up to the stay at home moms to figure everything out, without the benefit of any experience. From what I've read of 19th century fiction this narrative rings true, but I can't find any data per se. Still, it seems clear that today there are many adults who have had no contact with kids since they babysat their cousin and it makes the whole prospect of parenting seem difficult and alien.
* In Mediterranean countries (say), you see kids out in the evenings playing around the cafes and in the shops and working in the market - and the adults are doing their own thing but also attentive to whatever kid happens to be nearby. We took our then 3 year old to Morocco last summer, and in every town and market she was treated and cuddled and dandled - and if she was bawling (unavoidable when everything is strange and she just wants to see the family dog again) - strangers stepped up to entertain her, not to give us bad looks. Our society doesn't have to be the way it is.
* As with marriage, I think parenthood in the US is made harder by the delayed start. When people get married at 21, they aren't set in their ways, don't know where they are going - they're flexible and have tons of energy. Now people wait until they are 35 and it's *hard* to integrate your life with that of another adult. Same with parenting. I had some friends who had their kids at 21-24. I thought they were nuts, as I had fun and they were changing diapers and waking up all night. But it was really all they knew of married life and adult life. And then 10 years later, when I had my first kid, theirs were in school, taking care of themselves, and the parents were enjoying life. Meanwhile we were finding it very *hard* to adapt to the disruption to what had become very set ways. This observation doesn't help anyone who is 30, but if you are young and want kids, I'd say, get started.
* Phones are the worst. They are different than anything before. With the big kids we dealt with the internet and FB and online games but it was pretty easy to monitor. Smartphones are the devil's sandbox - just looking at inane instagram content will mush your brain, not to mentoin all the evil stuff out there, they dark corners of reddit. And it is hard to do without a phone, especially if they are going to free roam (which they do, they get around town on transit or foot, which saves us tons of schlepping). Our school was one of the first in the US with a cellphone ban, which is fantastic. At home they are expected to dock it in the kitchen at 6pm - they can come in and text friends etc but not sit in their room looking at random crap. And they know I have the security codes and can spot check at random (which is not very often, usually if they have been down and we're worried about bullying etc). If they break the rules there is a spare dumb phone (Nokia, $29) they get to use for a week. But it is a constant battle, and we struggle with it all the time. Smartphones are addictive!
Everything I wanted to post is in your post. Totally agree. I would only add that there are neighborhoods here where young kids walking to school etc alone is normalized, so look out for those places if you have flexibility of living location.
Another aspect of the younger start is then the grandparents are also younger and have more energy to help out. Having a 45 year old grandparent instead of a 65 year old grandparent helping with a infant or toddler is a big difference.
My wife and I both grew up in different, non American, cultures so have always had atypical (for Americans) expections about how much one should cater to kids. We have never hesitated to haul the kids around wherever we wanted to go, she even more a champ at this than I. I recall swimming down a undergound glacier-melt river in Turkey with a 2 year old - just put 'em in a life vest with a helmet - and the older kids were there to help toss them over the waterfalls. Notably the local guide also embraced the challenge. It was super cold but awesome fun.
Now, after all these years, my wife fears taking them out of the country - since they are obviously not 100% Caucasian, she expects ICE will detain us all on the way back in. Sad!
But I can't think of anything better to do with one's life and resources than experience new things. Which yes keeps one busy.
Great article, and I strongly agree with most of the ideas about 'less is more' parenting. I have many friends and family members who are parents, many of them single parents, and they very often fret over their children, never get away from their children, drive themselves to make the experiences of those children perfect while also running themselves into the ground and being somewhat miserable to spend time with, which seems counterproductive.
Since I'm not naming names, I can also say that their self-esteem is held together with duct tape and baling wire, and they need to feel like they're very important parents who will make all the difference between their child being a validated joy machine who siezes the world or a broken addict who wishes they were never born.
I don't want them to stop caring about what they do, but I do want them to have some perspective.
All that said, I do think we underestimate the social bit. It's not just police officers who judge: middle class modern American families are known for being all fakesmiles on the outside but extremely harsh and dismissive and accusatory with their gossip when backs are turned, and I think that any parent these days who doesn't make a show of hovering over their kids is assumed to be neglectful. It's the standard for parenting. The teachers and the neighbors and even others in your family will take note if you weren't there, protecting or arranging constant protection. It's not about kidnapping or drugs or screens, either. It's about simply falling down the stairs or throwing up your lunch, things our ancestors would have been annoyed with or even found funny.
We see kids as delicate. We're encouraged to, as we're obsessed with trauma and believe that kids need to be sheltered to allow them to become their authentic selves without getting prodded by social pressure or phobias. This isn't entirely a left-wing phenomenon, parents do it across the spectrum, but the morose parsing of pop psychology is somewhat left-coded and I do think you get a stronger whif of it around the electric car set.
The safe answer to this is to keep kids in the hosue, where no one at Target can hear them having a tantrum that makes you look like you deprive them, and no one can see them pulling a 12-pack of Mountain Dew onto their heads while you're in Housewares. Of course they're on their phones when they're at home, which is probably less bad than we think... but I would still advise everyone to support Jonathan Haidt as he crusades against phones in schools.
So I would encourage people to ease off on the parents that they know and stop overthinking things. We're culturally programmed to be critical of authority figures, including parents, and to assume that something in childhood is responsible for most of our issues. This mindset needs to take a Xanax. Most parents are doing fine, they're overdoing it if anything, and I think it's good to assume their kids will become who they're supposed to become and have a laugh with them without judgment.
Parenting can be fun, I've seen it. I DO believe it's profound and necessary for the continuation of society, don't ask me why, call it intuition.
>Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.
Communities!
My mother lived two blocks from her mother! Her mother lived in the same house with her mother! Family watched their kids whenever they needed some time or just for fun.
Both of them knew the names and general backgrounds of every couple within three blocks, and 'playdates' where a bunch of kids went to one house for half a day or more were the norm.
Local communities where your kid can walk over to a friend's house are great. Outside of meals/baths/etc., one parent can secondary-care or even primary-care 5 kids almost as easily as one, even more easily in some cases as they entertain each other. If you have 5 parent-friends with similar-age kids within walking distance, you can watch a gaggle of kids 1 night a week and have an empty house the other 4.
I don't agree with Bryan's overall thesis, it's too obvious to me from knowing people raised different ways, that good parenting - especially without neglect and abuse - is necessary for someone to be a good person along the dimensions that matter to me, and that doing so is actually a ton of work. Being a good dad is a massive life-long commitment. The twin studies he cites are just not likely to be measuring any of the stuff on the inputs or outputs that really matters to me.
Anyways, I have the time and energy to be a good parent to one kid, but not two, so that's how many I have.
On kids walking to school alone, etc, this may be frowned upon by the police where you are in SF, but in the nicer areas of South Bay it is super common. Lots of young kids are walking alone to and from the local public school here. It is quite normalized.
Mrs. AWall and I have three, including a set of twins. I can seriously sympathize with feeling overwhelmed with childcare. The cost of hiring additional help is nothing to sneeze at either; we paid for as little as we could get by with (e.g., no nannies, few babysitters) and were still shilling out about $40k per year in childcare at the peak. There are no perfect answers, so I’d say Caplan is right about being easier on yourself and how much you take on.
As for the kids playing outside matter, my experience was that our kids rarely played outside unsupervised until after COVID. When that happened, we ended up getting to know our neighbors better. This led to a greatly improved level of social trust in that we all look out for each other’s kids. Now, they are free to play outside unsupervised as long as they are in the area where we know mostly everyone. In an increasingly individualistic and atomized world, I can see that becoming less and leas common.
Does anyone have any intuition how the phone addicted and checked out moron undergrads squares with Tyler Cowen's contention that such people he interacts with are much smarter than they used to be?
First I must say that your twins are adorable. I miss those days.
Next, I am biased. I love Bryan’s essays and books. I share his thoughts on being a parent.
Finally, I am a dad with three children (now mostly grown—21, 25 & 27).
I became a full time parent (a professional parent) when our oldest son was diagnosed with ASD. But even so, I found myself with plenty of time for my own enterprises—I own a small business and I am something of perpetual student (about 75-100 books per year).
When our children were all in some form of school, they would all come home and play together. They enjoyed the same TV shows and would find other ways to entertain themselves. (They also had playdates and other outlets.)
Once real schoolwork began (my oldest was in first or second grade), I started to earn my keep—spending many hours with all three in the afternoons and in particular my oldest.
Fast forward to fifth grade, now my boys had become avid gamers (my wife blames my brother for giving them a GameCube). My third grade son got his older brother to lobby me for video gaming privileges during the school week. I agreed provisionally as long as work was completed and their school performance was maintained.
Today our sons are both engineers and our daughter is a year from graduating college—majoring in psychology.
We basically ignored conventional wisdom: the opinions of our friends and families. We never talked about SAT scores or colleges. All three kids picked their own majors and schools (and we were happy that most people never heard of those schools).
The bottom line is that I knew that our children would turn out well no matter what we did or didn’t do.
Why?—because my wife and I did.
PS—I came from a “broken home” with parents who cared more about hurting each other than being my parents. I barely graduated from HS and moved out and away from home on the day of my graduation. I joined the Army and later graduated from college and law school. Regardless of how bad my parents were, they were both extremely intelligent and successful people—apart from being miserable parents.
It's the phones. I had a friend who did afternoon activities for kids. She told me that a few years ago, when a group of small kids waited for the activities to start, they were running around, kicking balls, yelling at each other, having fun. Now the kids of the same age just keep standing silently, and if she asks them why they don't play, they sadly say "I don't have my phone here".
We tried to avoid this with our kids, but recently we bought a phone to our 10 years old, because all her classmates already have one. So while they are waiting for an afternoon club, she cannot talk to anyone anyway, because everyone else is busy playing with their phones -- she is the only one standing there without anything to do. So we bought her the phone, but she is only allowed to use it that one day when she has the after-school club; she is not allowed to use the phone any other day or at home. (We try to nudge our kids towards our ideas of good like, but we try to not make them look like weirdos too much, that could backfire.)
Ironically, most people around me think that I am the one who is careless about the dangers of technology, because my kids had their computers at home since they were about five. In my opinion, a phone is more dangerous than a computer. When you go outside, you leave the computer at home, but take the phone with you. (We encouraged going outside by measuring time: for each minute spent outside the kids gained the privilege of spending one minute by the computer.) When you go to the kitchen to eat, you leave the computer in the room, but take the phone with you. When you go to school, etc. Also, on a computer you can e.g. paint or write code; on a phone you can only play and browse social networks.
Scott, do you still play video games, Civ or otherwise? Do you find it addictive or at least super-stimulating - taking over time you would rather do lower dopamine hobbies? For me, I only play 5-10 hours a week, and I would say it borders on addiction, even though I run a business and have three kids. I attribute this to my parents not having stricter parameters on my gaming as a kid. I guess I carry this into my argument against screens for children.
As a gaming addict myself, I think it's more that I'm psychologically predisposed to gaming, and the only chance to not get addicted would be to completely avoid exposure, including in young adult years (where the parents would have no influence anyway). I did quit it cold turkey in my mid-late 20s (when I became more influenced by the perceived social stigma and also found other entertaining activities). What I now think might have helped would be if my parents were more encouraging so that I didn't feel the need to escape real life - but they probably did their best anyway.
I definitely agree about the psychological predisposition. I've seen many men and women that just don't have that draw which I have. I feel like my parents were very encouraging, yet I still had that draw... It's a complex issue.
Lovely family - very happy for you. There are obviously significant economies of scale available with at least one stay at home parent if you don't needlessly overdo the spending per child (private school? nah. AI homsechool). Basically opposite of South Korea. Caplan is probably right that most of the possible spending doesn't matter much. Related: extremely permissive parenting advocacy (grok/google Sovereign Child -Stupple)
> Every generation of Romans worried they were growing decadent and courting disaster. But eventually Rome did grow decadent and collapse.
I'm not convinced this is true. Rome did collapse. (Kind of) But was that due to decadance? I was under the impression that the reasons for collapse involved chronic lead poisoning leading to bad decisions. And/or excess military spending causing hyperinflation. Neither of these things really fit the implicit implications of "decadence". The story might be "romans worried about decadance for centuries, then some unrelated thing caused the empire to collapse".
Here are the things I want to say to you after reading this:
I love this post. Thank you.
I get the sense—though maybe I'm wrong—that there's a bit of “If other parents can handle this many childcare hours and I’m not doing anything obviously different, then I must be deficient” going on? If so, I want to push back on that.
I can’t do two hours of childcare a day without unraveling into a sobbing, panicky mess within a week—even though by all accounts, Cadence has been an unusually easy-to-parent baby and toddler. I think that while I’m with them, I’m an excellent parent. But I stay that way by some days not seeing them at all, and by rarely being with them for more than a couple hours at a time.
I knew this would be true of me going in. It’s why I agreed to become a parent only under very unusual circumstances that wouldn’t require more conventional parenting from me.
And I think that’s fine. I think I’m not just a decent person, but also a good parent. My brain processes things the way it does. Babies impact me the way they do. I need certain support structures to parent well, just like I need various kinds of support to do anything well. I don't think it matters to my worthiness or adequacy what supports other people do or don't need. Cadence is happy and thriving. When they boop my nose, I make a funny noise. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I imagine this perspective might be relatively rare, and possibly useful to hear.
And to be clear, I recognize your situation has been deeply unfine—at least pre-supplemental-nanny—in that you were stuck parenting more than was good for you. But I don’t believe there’s some minimum number of childcare hours per day that one must tolerate without stress or breakdown in order to count as a good parent. I don’t think needing less chaos and more focus makes you a worse person. And depending on how you respond to that fact, I don’t think it makes you a worse parent either.
> "I can’t do two hours of childcare a day without unraveling into a sobbing, panicky mess within a week—even though by all accounts, Cadence has been an unusually easy-to-parent baby and toddler."
I know it's weird talking about your personal child in a blog comment, or disagreeing with you about your child's personality, but our mutual friends who have helped you with childcare say that Cadence is great but demands so so many walks that it leaves them much more exhausted than when caring for other toddlers.
oh i forgot about them needing walks as an infant! feels like it's been such a long time since that was a thing. these days we set them loose on the trampoline or a playground instead.
I wish Caplan had emphasized more in his book how very different the different phases of childhood are from a difficulty-vs-benefit-of-time-spent-with-kids perspective. Ages 1-4 are waaaaaay harder and more boring than 4-8 which are also much harder and more boring than 9+. And the nerdier your kids are the more this is true.
True recent story: my 12yo son and I have a long running game of FizzBuzz, where you say ever-higher integers using codes for their prime factors, or just the integer if none of the codes apply, and he keeps making up more codes for factors so he can say more cool things, so e.g. 89 is now "actinium" because that's the atomic number for actinium, and 101 is "dalmatians" because of course it is. He spent a long time coming up with and rejecting codes for 11, until finally he hit on the perfect one: 11 is "chametz"... because it's a leaven.
The point is, you are in the middle of the worst drudgery and most of the greatest joys are ahead of you.
I can’t tell you how happy it makes me in terms of trusting your reasonings and investing time reading you, to know you’re a harried parent. It seems a part of development most should have…and this from a person who’s not had it.
I have a 3yo and an almost-2yo, and one thing I’ve observed is that different kids require a lot more attention, even in the 6mo-18mo range. This can lead to very qualitatively different degrees of exhaustion. And of course people over extrapolate from their own experience, it’s hard not to. You might even write a book inflected with your own experience! For me, anyway, seeing some kids who require comparatively little effort vs. my own made me realize that the distribution is wide.
(Typed out while my 3yo took a long shower and needed something from me about every 45 seconds.)
I've worked in education a short time, and it's not just learning which is poorer than when I was at school, but behaviour as well. But ironically, pedagogy is way better. I would kill to have been taught using the skills and techniques they use today. I would have learnt so much faster.
And at the risk of sounding bonkers, I don't think it's just parenting, technology and social media. There are studies that have shown that mattresses emit chemicals that disrupt brain development, and for a while now it's been established that a few food diet (used for allergy treatment) can treat some kids adhd, and a recent study found that a healthy diet was even more effective, possibly comparable to the effects of medication. There's also evidence that the increasing amount of processed foods each generation eats is linked to the youth mental health crisis.
Insightful bit form a recent Andrew Rilstone essay:
> Twice a week someone writes an article about what the Internet has taken away from us, and how wonderful it would be if we didn’t have mobile phones. “Oh, the wifi went down one night and there was beautiful silence and conversation and we all started to play charades, darling!”
>
> “Why don’t you play charades when the wifi is not down?”
>
> Because we don’t want to.
>
> I find the people who pull out their phones the moment there is a lull in the conversation incredibly irritating. I get so annoyed that I pull out my phone and post something amusing about them on Twitter. I am distracted by the people who text in cinemas or at gigs: not by the light or the noise, particularly. I am distracted by the mere fact of other people being distracted even if they are not distracting me.
>
> But people who get out their phones during the good bit of a film, or when I am coming to the punchline of a joke they have only heard three or four times before are the same people who used to pull paperback books out of their pockets on movie night; whose face was always obscured by the Times or the Daily Mirror; who wouldn’t make eye-contact with me at breakfast because they were more interested in the ingredients on the orange juice carton. And there were kids who used to get hit with the big stick for fidgeting and not paying attention at school; and ladies who wouldn’t go anywhere, including theatres and prayer meetings, without their knitting, and men who knew very well that smoking was incredibly bad for them but needed something to do with their hands.
>
> And people have always liked pictures of ladies with no clothes on and cute kittens: what do you think tabloid newspapers were for?
>
> Phones don’t irritate people; people irritate people.
I don't think this dissolves the Problem Of Phones entirely but internalising it makes me a lot less worried about things like the gym story.
I find that I don't (metaphorically) play charades when the power is on, but enjoy it a lot when there's a blackout. You can talk all you want about how this makes me a bad person, but that's just how it is. People bring up the idea of addiction (something you don't want to do, but do anyway) to explain this, and whether or not you like using that exact word I don't think it's useful to deny the phenomenon.
There's something to it, but I do think the problem is overstated because people are afraid or embarrassed to admit that they like modern, "easy" pleasures better than classier pastimes. There's definitely a sense in which scrolling through reddit in public is lower-status than reading a print newspaper, and I don't think there's any sensible reason for that.
(There is also a related but distinct thing, which is really what I was most struck by in the extract I posted, where a kind of Protestant-work-ethic-derived "purity drive" makes it low-status to admit that you'd rather do two things at once than stay laser-focused on a single activity, albeit a pleasant one. We don't begrudge runners their earphones. And no one expects someone at the gym to be bench-pressing non-stop; taking short rest stops is part of the process. Why would it be nobler to spend them staring off into the void, rather than catching up on DMs? Phones in classrooms might sap away too much of a student's attention but in a case like *this* I really don't see the downside to alleviating boredom.)
I'm not sure why you would think twin one year-olds would NOT be exhausting. I wouldn't worry about this too much if I were you...most parents and all kids don't even remember this stage later, ergo, why worry about it.
Parents mostly are crazy today because they have time to be. When you have 3+ kids, you can't bother worrying so much, so you don't (I note this from observation of my many neighbors with 4+ kids).
Yes we roamed and did all kinds of stuff as kids in the 80s, but also, our parents didn't necessarily know what we were doing. I rode my bike for miles, but my parents didn't know about it. They had no way to know what we were doing, there was no tracking, and we all just lied constantly to our parents.
In the 90s, when I was 12, I babysat after school for an infant under aged one and three children under age six. I was paid three dollars an hour for this. I am pretty sure no one would allow a twelve year to watch four children under age six alone nowadays, including one that was an infant and still on a bottle. It was fine, no one ever got hurt or died.
My parents were typical slackers not paying much attention when I was a kid, and they mostly let me play in the yard or my room alone. I locked myself into bathrooms several time as 2-4 year old. I climbed a ceiling-high bookshelf and brought it crashing down upon me. I climbed and jumped out of my second story window. I was cooking myself hotdogs and such by age six and only started a kitchen fire twice. At age three I was caught playing with matches. The point is that in fact we were doing dangerous things, but mostly didn't die nor burn the house down, though every once in while those things did in fact happen. When I was in elementary school two kids died because they broke through ice on a pond and died, for example. It just wasn't something parents worried about so much because most still didn't read news except in a newspaper and it wasn't as salient.
Worrying about kidnapping is silly -- no one wants anyone else's kids. It's so rare when it happens without it being caught quickly that it's national news for months and they're making Netflix documentaries years later.
Gosh, reading all these comments on how three year olds are self sufficient and won't run into traffic... My NINE year old ran directly in front of a car during school dropoff because he was too absent minded. He was stubborn as hell as a baby and would scream for hours to get his way (I also was stubborn as hell, which is why it was hours). Last year he got a diagnosis of ADHD/ODD - I was so firmly of the view that "ADHD etc. behavioural disorders are highly overdiagnosed and it's mostly just a bunch of weak willed parents", it took until COVID home schooling for me to suspect something, and even longer for my wife to accept it. Medication seems to help and Child #2 has been phenomenally easier with no behavioural problems. All this to say - if you're really trying the "hands off" parenting method and it's not working, don't just assume the problem is you.
I'd also say: the first was the hardest because at that time you are also changing who you are as a person. In an analogy I picked up from Russ Roberts, you're becoming a vampire - a fundamental change to who you are that you wouldn't reverse but that cannot be adequately communicated to those who haven't experienced the change themselves. I was highly resistant to this change for the first ~3 years of my first son, still trying to hustle and hold friendships going to dinners and maintain an active lifestyle. By the time #2 came I was willing to give up a lot of that, be less stubborn and just let my kid watch TV or whatever (within limits, I still hate them watching any streaming content even though my wife is a constant enabler) and the experience is vastly different.
Perhaps you see yourself and Bryan Caplan as sitting on different ends of some spectrum of parenting intensity, but I suspect that, if zoomed out, you’d look like two ants near the end of a very big log.
I shouldn’t assume, but I will. I assume you BOTH have a decent cushion in the bank, a decent level of generational wealth in at least one partner’s family, a decent level of confidence in your own earning potential, and a decent level of confidence in your children carrying a better-than-average set of genetic potentialities.
For people like you (or, if I’ve missed the mark, like this) the parenting intensity debate sounds like so much navel-gazing and existential guilt and even awe (what am I here for if not to bask in the joys of the parental mentorship role? am I selfish for not addressing my OWN phone addiction? did I really play my cards so right that I can treat parenting like the royalty of yesteryear got to? etc.).
For the other half, which I will define as those who can’t afford to have one of their adult offspring end up in a state of permanent dependence due to either a series of parental failures or One Really Big Mistake, it’s perfectly rational to parent intensively in an effort to set their offspring on a more secure and lucrative life path. If you consider the purchasing power of today’s dollar, the cost of living, and the stagnation of wages (which we fretted about in the 90s when we were young and which has now persisted for another entire generation since), “let your kids run about and eventually they’ll be fine” could be described as a poor prediction of future outcomes. Actually, no, the average middle-class kids are not alright (do they even exist?), and no, you can no longer buy a decent family home and pay the bills on a single not-so-ambitious wage earner’s income.
So you’ve got some people (would-be members of the mythical and perhaps extinct middle-class, defined and trapped by their mediocrity) who are rationally intensifying their parenting and others (you) who are rationally wondering why the numbers look that way, and you won’t make sense of the overall picture without an understanding of these demographics and the economic climate.
The impact of AI is another interesting factor. But perhaps it cuts the other way? The middle class have been intensifying their parenting in recent decades due to offshoring, and AI threatens to “offshore” the laptop class? That would make the more contemporary neuroses of “the elite” seem more rational: to the extent that they wish both to have a rich family life and legacy and also not to doom their children to an impoverished future (and perhaps to the extent that they have even seen whiffs of such a danger in their less fortunate contemporaries while successfully insulating themselves to date), it would make sense that they would both continue procreating AND be fretting more and more about it in recent years.
I also think there’s an element of “here’s what messed me up: the intensity of being somewhat intensely parented in the somewhat more insecure 90s/00s without emotionally educated adults to help me process that pressure” and that turns into “okay now I can’t let off the gas for economic reasons but I ALSO have to set my kids up for mental wellness and self-love” and that’s a huge interpersonal project whose labor intensity cannot be managed (there’s no dishwasher or ready-made dinner equivalent for emotionally-focused child care).
I guess this is all to take your AI inflection and use it to paint a richer picture of the current parenting zeitgeist. I suppose your solution—just don’t—does address one major chunk of these problems. But in my view, it doesn’t adequately account for the massive social upheaval that we could expect to result anytime an older generation vastly outnumbered its descendants (see baby boom on steroids). I think AI raises the stakes significantly (and perhaps it means intensive parenting is the ONLY possible way for a child to escape being shuffled into elder care). But I don’t think it’s irrational to see the jobs problem AND the looming generational collapse problem (if anti-natalist advocacy succeeded or anti-natalist choices became widespread) and to make the game theoretic choice not to “defect” (where “defection” could also be criticized as freeloading in any scenario in which the defector nonetheless chooses to live past the senility/frailty tipping point, say retirement for the sake of argument).
I glossed over this, but Caplan spends a lot of the book focusing on twin studies that he thinks (and I agree) prove that intensive parenting doesn't make as much difference as people think. It's not just "my kids have a cushion so they can afford to fail", it's that it doesn't matter because your intensive parenting doesn't affect the chance of failure.
There are a few caveats to this, most notably that it can't prove anything about forms of parenting so strange or intense that few examples made it into the studies. And I'll be writing in a few weeks about challenges to twin studies and whether or not they stick.
That’s an important nuance to address: maybe the desperation is understandable given the circumstances (I predict that my children will struggle economically absent some intervention, either personal or structural, and I’m probably right) but the approach is misguided (I predict that this particular intervention will help a lot, but I’m probably wrong).
I’ve never dug into the twin studies, so I look forward to reading your forthcoming work on this. My intuition is that (1) there can be both increasing and diminishing returns on parenting intensity and (2) directionality is key.
On (2), the Williams sisters were coached intensively by their father, had some degree of natural aptitude, and were lucky enough to be coached in the “right” sport for their particular physical and mental traits. I think this latter factor gets little attention and it doesn’t seem possible to give it decent treatment in twin studies, but perhaps I’m wrong.
To put some more meat on the bones, if you intensely parent a could-be Olympic gymnast toward cross-country running or adopt a laissez-faire approach, you may fail to see the insane payout that gymnastics coaching would have had in that child’s life, and both children may end up in similar places later in life. So it may not be a binary choice (to spend lots of time parenting or to let your kids run free), as the intensity can take flavors that are either counter-productive, simply not all that helpful, or wildly productive for the child. I realize that I’m being somewhat loose in my definition of intense parenting (lots of quality time vs targeted hothousing/coaching), but I wonder if any of the twin studies really captured the directionality variable. Are separated identical twins less likely than other children to receive intense parenting that is also extremely attuned to the potential of the child? My prediction is that the average adoptive parents, despite their best intentions, would be flying blinder than the average parent with respect to the genetic potential and inchoate emotional tendencies/personality traits of their children (lacking the ability to see their younger selves in their mini-mes), so perhaps twin studies can’t really answer this question for us as well as they can others.
I also think it’s important to recognize that intensity of parenting can have wildly different expressions along the axis of emotional valence. In other words, cranky, maladjusted, or resentful parents may harm their children by spending a lot of time with them, while well-adjusted parents may give them a boost by doing the same. I wonder if he mentioned, or you know of, any twin studies that account for this. It’s similar to the directionality point, but it operates more in the realm of mental and emotional health. Perhaps you have insight from your professional experience.
It strikes me that one measure of how good a country's immigration system is how much higher ALL 2018 is than NAT 2018.
By this measure, just about every country has a failing immigration system. The US actually isn't that bad, it's only -3 compared to -16 in Austria or -22 in Germany. At a quick scan, Australia is the only country where this number is actually positive, and New Zealand the only country where it's zero.
You object that intelligence isn't everything, maybe we should be optimising for immigrants who are hard-working or nice or good-looking or creative instead of just smart, and that's a reasonable point, but if you're a first-world country then demand for immigration places sufficiently exceeds supply that you could optimise for all of these things at once. Right now, immigration to first-world countries shows no sign of being optimised for anything.
I agree with most of your points, but my model of pro-immigration advocates like Bryan Caplan is that they would object that if you're in a bar, and ten low-IQ people walk into the bar, you have technically "lowered the average IQ" of the bar but nobody (including you) is worse off. You and your smart friends are as smart as ever, and can invent just as many rocket ships or whatever, but now you also have a lot of cheap labor, and potential friends who can benefit you in ways other than intelligence.
I think this underweights the degree to which we live in a society whose norms and politics are an average of what works for all of their members, but that it's not completely wrong - I basically take it something like 50% seriously.
I feel like when you do an argument from analogy, you're supposed to reach for an analogy which helps to make the original situation clearer, not an analogy which strips the original situation of most of the important features and makes it all better.
"There's a bear in my living room and it won't leave" "Ah yes, but what if you just saw a bear walking past the house, that wouldn't be so bad, would it?"
Obviously there's many important ways in which a bar is not like a country, which seem too obvious to even bother listing.
When the smart people are "diluted", that makes it more difficult for them to find each other, even if their absolute numbers stay the same. The analogy could be that you and your friends are together somewhere, and then a large mob of strangers enters the room and gets you separated... you know that your friends are still there somewhere, but you can't see them.
You and your friends can keep inventing rocket ships, but you also need to start homeschooling your kids, because the educational system adapted to lower IQ is no longer capable of producing rocket ship builders. (Perhaps this part is less visible for Caplan who already homeschools his kids.)
Parenting is hard, but then so is every worthwhile undertaking; I'm not sure why anyone would suggest otherwise. Also, why would the phenomenon of declining school performance be considered 'fake' on the basis of one significant contributor being demographic shift? Doesn't the term 'fake' suggest a deliberate attempt to deceive? I don't think anyone's trying to make school results out to be even worse than they really are - if anything, the opposite (in Australia, lower-performing students are often discouraged from taking the standardised testing).
The supposed 'golden age' of free-range kids - the 70s and 80s, I guess - masked much parental negligence, benign at best, and at worst turning blind eyes to abuse. The Australian journalist Richard Glover's riveting 2015 memoir deals with this (noting that at least one of his parents was an alcoholic; not uncommon). The 'helicopter parenting' of later decades was at least in part a reaction. I'm wondering if Caplan addresses this aspect? Haidt and Lukianoff, in The Coddling of the American Mind, tend to gloss over it if I'm remembering the book accurately (was a while ago I read it).
> The supposed 'golden age' of free-range kids - the 70s and 80s, I guess - masked much parental negligence, benign at best, and at worst turning blind eyes to abuse.
But people did have more kids. Perhaps that's the price that is paid for a sustainable society.
I'm also from that era, and most of my friends (like me) had one sibling at most. So I'm not sure that larger families were the norm; if anything, I think that today's higher incomes have encouraged more choice about family size. FWIW, the official stats suggest that the births per woman from 1984 and from 2013 were nearly identical (Australia, being where I'm from): 1.881 (1984) and 1.882 (2013), i.e. close enough to 2, see table 3 on p. 14 here:
I meant "fake" in the sense that it would mean that no individual child was getting worse, and we wouldn't need to search for culprits like phones or bad policy.
One of the big things that I haven't seen discussed here is there's actually a big difference between physical and mental labor in the home when it comes to watching children. If you are doing textile production for example as people (mostly women) have done since antiquity then maintaining an awareness of a child not difficult, you can even chat with them to keep them and you entertained while performing the necessary and productive work.
But this doesn't work when it comes to mental labor like trying to write a blog post, you can't watch them well and having them draw your attention away constantly hurts your productivity. I don't think there's anything really to be done about it, but I think it is important to not get into the thinking of "I'm working from home so should be able to watch the kids easily."
I found it very difficult to complete even the most basic and necessary household tasks while caring for very young children, which is one of the reasons it's psychologically draining: you think 'I should be able to do the washing, but I can't...' The only solution was to put off the tasks, and wholeheartedly join in playing 'Jason and the Argonauts Defeat the Harpies' one more time instead.
Another argument in favour of the second nanny/ babysitter: two parent households is very unnatural for humans. It’s crazy how much easier it is to handle a toddler when 3 people are on the task vs 2, and how much easier 4 is than 3. We used to do it as villages. Having family around is a massive help. Failing that, it’s fair to outsource.
Someone told me a funny story about someone who grew up in Samoa where parenting is easy because it’s a group task and parents hardly get to see their kids with all the family around (according to this anecdote - no idea of veracity). They moved to America Samoa and thought it would be just as easy - and they couldn’t believe how hard it was as two parents alone in a suburban context. Don’t know if this makes sense or is true, so just take it as a fable.
I read SRtHMK and I gotta say I now understand where the disconnect between that book and my own experience as a new father came from: we are not a household that can afford a nanny and two babysitters on a single income.
Caplan sounds like Mitt Romney telling college students, “If you can’t afford tuition, no problem, just borrow the money from your parents!” Um, thanks.
> “traditional kidnapping” where a creep in a white van plucks a child off the streets is much rarer - only about 100 such incidents come to the attention of the authorities per year. Even if the true number is 10x higher (is this is a reasonable multiplier?)
No? Why in the world would 90% of child-abduction-by-strangers go unreported? People keep track of where their children are, become extremely agitated if they can't, and have no desire to protect strangers from the police.
It could be true that 90% of abduction-by-strangers goes unreported because nobody ever realizes it happened, but in that case you wouldn't want to include those cases in your risk calculations because they don't feature any risk.
> only about 100 such incidents come to the attention of the authorities per year. Even if the true number is 10x higher (is this is a reasonable multiplier?) that’s still only 1/70,000 children per year. On the other hand, over ~ten years of relevant childhood (I’m assuming babies can’t get into white vans, and nobody wants to kidnap 17 year olds) that’s a 1/7,000 chance.
If you calculate the total per-childhood risk from the 100/year figure, it shouldn't matter how for many years of childhood the risk exists for! If it exists for a longer period, that increases the number the per-year risk should be multiplied with, but it also proportionately increases the number of children of those ages in the US, and thus proportionately decreases the peer-year risk. Converting it to a per-year-per-child risk and then back to a per-childhood risk just adds error.
There was a similar problem that baffled me in coverage of covid.
At some point the media went into a frenzy over the realization that people could be infected without showing any symptoms (ever). There was a blitz of coverage with the message "this shows that things are much worse than we thought!"
But it's impossible for that to reveal that things are worse than we thought. You have a certain number of problems that arise from the disease. We had been measuring the disease by counting those problems.
If you learn that it's common to have the disease without having any problems, then your estimate of the prevalence of the disease goes up by a lot, which the media coverage successfully realized.
They didn't seem to realize that your estimate of how much of a problem it is to have the disease goes down by an amount that exactly balances this. The two effects _must_ balance exactly, because the number of problems doesn't change!
For your point:
> If you calculate the total per-childhood risk from the 100/year figure, it shouldn't matter how for many years of childhood the risk exists for!
It definitely matters how many years the risk exists for in terms of the definition of childhood used to report the annual statistic. If that statistic is reporting annual kidnappings of 0-10-year-olds, but kidnappings of 11-35-year-olds also exist and are simply reported separately, you'll draw the wrong conclusions by only looking at 0-10-year-olds.
> At some point the media went into a frenzy over the realization that people could be infected without showing any symptoms (ever). There was a blitz of coverage with the message "this shows that things are much worse than we thought!"
That may have been reasonable at some point depending on the details of the argument: that it could be had and transmitted asymptomatically meant the chain of transmission couldn't be broken buy just quarantining symptomatic cases, as was done with SARS v1 (?).
> It definitely matters how many years the risk exists for in terms of the definition of childhood used to report the annual statistic. If that statistic is reporting annual kidnappings of 0-10-year-olds, but kidnappings of 11-35-year-olds also exist and are simply reported separately, you'll draw the wrong conclusions by only looking at 0-10-year-olds.
It does matter whether what the statistic considers childhood is the same as what Scott does, but it didn't sound like Scott checked that.
> that it could be had and transmitted asymptomatically meant the chain of transmission couldn't be broken buy just quarantining symptomatic cases, as was done with SARS v1 (?).
And it also shows that breaking the chain of transmission is not important. The idea of breaking the chain of transmission was to prevent an increase in problems. If it turns out that transmission was going without impediment the whole time, that means... letting transmission go can't cause an increase in problems.
Once you've learned that "we've been having massive outbreaks everywhere, but nobody noticed", there is no reason to try to prevent "outbreaks" (what would the difference be?), nor does it make conceptual sense to refer to "outbreaks".
> If it turns out that transmission was going without impediment the whole time, that means... letting transmission go can't cause an increase in problems.
It could, at the beginning when only a small fraction of the population had already been infected (even counting the asymptomatic cases). Idk at what point the media frenzy you referred to happened.
> One potential argument is that the child trends mostly mirror adult trends. Adult accident death rates have also gone way down (and adult murder rates stayed about the same) since the 1960s. The simplest explanation is that child trends simply mirror adults. And the adult trend certainly isn’t caused by coddling. So maybe the kids aren’t either.
Consider the possibility that adult accidental death rates are going down because adults don't go outside anymore either. Adults nowadays spend much less time out and about with people---they're much more likely to be inside, watching Netflix or doing something else on the internet, alone and/or with online friends. So you could say adults are being "coddled", in a sense, by themselves.
It seems possible to me, in fact likely, that kids going outside less is responsible for reducing the accidental death rate for kids in the same way that fewer adults going outside is responsible for reducing the accidental death rate for adults.
You have to avoid noticing your kids biting each other or fighting. If you see the kids behaving dangerously you will be emotionally compelled to action. The kids must be out of site. Its the only way.
Great review! Given my own ~5 months of experience with parenting so far, I think I would not have liked this book--Glad you could give me some analysis of the highlights instead!
A couple comments I had regarding parenting time:
1) Even the Wilken and Cullie graph has mothers and fathers only doing a combined <800 minutes ie. 13 hours of parent-child time for 0-year olds. Who's looking after the baby for the other 11 hours??
2) These graphs seem to be depicting only the parenting time where the parent is actually looking after the child... What about:
- pumping time. That alone is like 4 hours a day. (If you're like me, you can't look after the child while pumping, because you need to be constant massaging for the milk to flow.)
- washing and steam-sanitizing bottles and pump parts
- washing poop out of onesies when diapers leak (so that when you put it in the laundry, it doesn't get the entire load of laundry poopy)
- figuring out if the problem is your own low supply, your pump being inefficient, or your baby's poor latch, etc, figuring out how to use a pump, figuring out what it is that makes a hospital grade pump better (whether it's worth renting one), finding out where to rent one, driving 2 hours each way to pick up the rental pump.
- figuring out whether pumping is even worth the hassle. (Bryan Caplan would probably say no, since no parenting things matter apparently, but that Belorussian study you cited in the biodeterminists guide said possibly 6 IQ points! That seems like a lot of IQ points. Also it reduced the chances of SIDS! Even Bryan Caplan has to admit that that matters, right?)
- figuring out what to do about the measles outbreak. (Apparently getting an early extra dose before 8.5 months reduces the efficacy of later doses, so that in the long term, your child ends up with less immunity than a child who didn't get an extra dose, but getting an extra does between 8.5 months and 1 year has no downsides afaik?)
- also reading up on the spread of the measles outbreak with dread as it creeps closer to your county
- figuring out whether all the stuff going on at the FDA would have any effect on the safety of the formula you're buying
- reading about SIDS. waking up on a cold sweat and having to check that baby is breathing and then not being able to fall back asleep and reading more about SIDS. trying to buy a baby heart rate/oxygen monitor, reading about all of them, and getting choice paralysis about it, and not ultimately buying any.
- trying to figure out if you might have post partum anxiety or something. Trying to look up if there's a therapist covered by your insurance who can help you figure this out, calling a couple, and getting overwhelmed and giving up (but anyway it's not anxiety if there really is a measles outbreak in your state, right?)
And that's just based on five months of parenting! I've been told it only gets scarier from here.
Although I will say this: For me, it's so worth it. Having a baby has kind of magnified all my feelings somehow, like, yes, the stress, the despair, the exhaustion, but also the joy, the love, the love, the love. (Not just for my child, too! I always loved my husband, but I somehow love him so, so much more now, seeing his love for our child, our family.)
Re: screens, my two year old is allowed the phone but under the following conditions:
1. Absolutely no shorts/TikTok/etc. if he watches something, it's age appropriate cartoons like Bluey and so on.
2. He can only use our (parents) phones, will not get a tablet for himself. This takes care of him having the phone for too long, since then our own addiction kicks in and we want it back, or he loses interest.
I find this setup to work pretty well. He likes to watch things on the phone, but he also loses interest and gives it back relatively fast. And it works wonders if for example you are doing groceries on your own and he decides that right now is the time to run away screaming. I find the biggest challenge to be with myself: since it is a tool that works so well, I sometimes need to fight the urge to give it to him just because I'm tired and not feeling parenting at the moment... Thankfully I succeed the majority of times.
Not a parent but I was a child whose parents tried to keep him away from computers and limit his screentime, which was infuriating and I did act out pretty bad a few times because of it. Am I addicted to screens? I mean, I spend ~14 hours a day looking at screens, I figure that's as addicted as they get. The thing is, I'm a programmer... I kinda feel like, on some level, not becoming addicted to screens was never an option for me? Even as a kid, I knew this was going to be the thing I wanted to spend my life doing. - Of course, I'm saying this on a website where everybody knows each other from online. Would I have more IRL friends with more screentime restrictions? I kinda feel I got all the IRL friends I could reasonably expected to get at school! I went to their homes and stared at screens there.
I don't have any social media or gambling apps on my phone. I'm not sure if that's a difference in quality? I get my intermittent reinforcement the old-fashioned way, checking for story updates to the dozens of fanfics I'm subscribed to. Is that the same as TikTok? Is the level I'm at simply exactly the correct level and the problem with kids these days is just that they're beyond it? Thing is, if I had a phone in school I'd absolutely parse as "phone addicted". Since I didn't have a phone in school, I just fell asleep in class or stared out the window not paying attention. I'm not sure if that's supposed to have better outcomes?
"Same as it ever was, but 30% more intense"? Or maybe my addictions and tendencies worked out because my environment was just less optimized? Maybe it's a thing where with the superstimulus environment, as a kid you're always courting ruin and being courted, and it genuinely matters whether ruin has a 40% or 60% effective sales pitch. Maybe we need to outlaw phones with bright colors and excited voices in advertisements. Just degrade its ability to make war to 1990 level.
Did you mess about with computers as a kid, or were you too late for that?
Because it seems like the phones would not create the same caliber of digital natives, in the way that most of us cannot do any work on our modern cars.
I don’t know that you suffered any damage at all - - just suggesting that there might be a difference between “screen time” and its potential in different eras.
Scott, you are correct in that you are not overwhelmed by 2h of childcare but by the rest of the day.
> When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
A good solution for you would be to set clear boundaries and get out of the house to work, even at the "cost" of taking on more than 2h (to make things fair for your wife). E.g. take care of the kids between 7-8/9, then go to a coworking space or (much better IMO) rent a small office 10 min away from your home, then come back at 6. This nets you 2-3h of actually caring for your kids, but your time away from them will be much, much less "overwhelming". You can still come home in 10 min if something happens that requires you.
I think daycare is also an excellent solution that will be beneficial to you and your wife, and that you are overestimating the effects of disease (not saying that you won't get sick, just that the benefits outweigh the costs).
"if you kept your kid away from phones until age 18" (here I wanted to put the "laughing so hard I'm crying emoticon 3 times", but I don't know how to do it). Love the way you casually write this as if it were in any way physically possible... We managed to hold off with both our daughters till 13; they were, ostensibly, the last ones in their class...
I grew up in rural Canada and my back yard was literally a wilderness filled with bears, mountain lions, etc. Our mom sent us off into the woods from lunch time until dinner and in the meantime had NO idea where we were or what we were doing. And she was a stay-at-home mom. Buuuuut, there were 4 of us... so my two bits on a theory about this is that, since people had more kids, they were slightly less anxious about them (ie. they figured if by some slim chance one of them got eaten by a bear (or kidnapped by the white-van guy), they still had 3 or 4 left, so no biggy). Now most of us have 1 or max 2 kids and we are hysterical about keeping them safe and making them successful (I'm absolutely guilty myself of this). So some kind of a manifestation of our drive to keep our genes alive? Less offspring = higher level of care and vice-versa.
Final thought: Scott, you mention being overwhelmed by your kids at the moment, and I can only say (now that mine are in their late teens), that the day will come when you will look back on the chaos and the exhaustion and you will wish so badly you could be back there again...
"he day will come when you will look back on the chaos and the exhaustion and you will wish so badly you could be back there again..."
Not necessarily. I think it depends on your personality.
I have a teen and a pre-teen, and they're so much easier and more fun at this age, and I'm continually grateful that the baby/toddler years are over, especially whenever I see (or read about) other babies/toddlers.
But I know there are some parents whose favourite part is the baby or toddler stage, and once the kids are past that stage they want to have another baby to recapture it!
A facsimile of my child or baby is in my dreams sometimes. It is so bittersweet, though as with all my dreams it is always "off" in various ways. These dreams replaced the old ones where the child was in peril, through mischance at a distance from you somehow and you needed to get him back; which themselves replaced the ones where you were trying to find a class in a confusing building, that you had missed out attending and now there was a test, and you weren't even sure of the subject.
Yesterday evening, my twelve-year-old daughter looked at me and my wife through her big round glasses and explained to us why it would be better if the year had 13 months. "I've done the calculations." Each month would have 28 days and would begin on a Monday. The extra month's name is Omtomber.
What I mean is that the first year (or, uh, three) is hard. But it does get easier and it is worth it.
Thanks for the shout-out. Our two kids were raised about as free-range as possible. My wife and I live way out in the country on lots of land with deer, porcupines, bears and groundhogs galore. The kids grew up digging ponds, making forts and finding snakes. The eldest didn’t get a phone until she was 13, but the phones are still like crack. We are about a pro-education a household as you could imagine, and neither child is interested in academics. My experience as a parent is that I apparently have very little influence and who your child turns out to be is like Forrest Gump’s chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get.
I expect the reason most kidnapped kids get returned is that most 'kidnappings' are estranged parents violating custody agreements, not white van men picking up children to whom they are total strangers. My guess is most white van man kidnappings go less well, sadly.
I’m sure you’re right. It also makes me think, is there a name for this phenomenon? The typical rape isn’t a stranger in the dark, it’s ’we were on a date and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.’ The typical murder isn’t a well-thought-through Agatha-Christie gambit, it’s ‘interpersonal violence can be unexpectedly deadly.’ Something about crime being typically more like ordinary behaviour gone wrong than something alien to everyday experience.
The advice that got me through my children's childhood was from my laconic brother-in-law with three kids: "You must learn to differentiate between what is dangerous and what is life-threatening".
Parent of two teenagers here. I tell everyone who asks that parenting is both the easiest thing, and the hardest thing, you will ever do. The big stuff is easy: kids tell you when they are hungry, if you changed the diaper incorrectly, etc. Kids are, to a very great extent, self monitoring.
But it's also the hardest thing I ever did, because at no point was I ever in control. They tell you what they need and want, and you respond in the moment, because you love them, the little bastards. I was a stay at home dad, responsible for the majority of the childcare in our household, and early on I realized that I just had to let go of control over my daily schedule, because the kids were in charge of that.
I had help (four in-laws, all of whom were wonderful). So there were times I could just drop them off at someone else's house overnight, and that was wonderful. My wife and I became skilled at detecting when the other one was at the end of their rope, and take over the childcare for the day. "Go away" she would say, and I would, coming back several hours later when I was more relaxed (by which time she needed spelled).
I was a proud helicopter parent. At no time before the age of 14 were they ever alone without one adult's eyeball on them (assuming the school was doing their job properly). They received no electronic devices before that age (actually, we experimented by giving my oldest in 6th grade a phone--it didn't work out, so we took it away).
It probably mattered that my kids didn't have many friends growing up. They weren't esp. isolated, I don't think anyone's kids did. That just isn't what they do now. So they wanted by attention, and by and large I gave it to them. When they gradually began pulling away, I let them do that too. The kids are in charge, even if I never let them know it.
My oldest had a mental illness--so my experience may not be typical. Bu they are both independent now, and I am very proud of them.
I think every child is different, and you give them the attention they need. Try not to stress over how stressful it's going to be. And by the time they are 18, you will wish it could last a little longer.
Indeed. I was very young and learning about being adult, when I was a mother. Always trying to demonstrate that I could care for my child and also keep a nice home on a dime, and earn what was essentially just spending money through various dumb part-time gigs; and cook all our meals, and learn all the crafts, etc. Later I wished instead of mopping the floor, I had played with him more.
I think the answer to the past and theoretically to the present is simple, but also often impossible. More kids!
Imagine it's 1960 and you're a mom of five kids born over 10 years. Your 10-year-old has been helping with the little kids for several years and is responsible enough to keep the youngers entertained reasonably safely. The 8 and 6-year-olds can at least help with the entertainment and keeping the littles from getting badly hurt. They can come find you if something bad happens. Even the 3 or 4-year old can help keep the smallest ones busy and don't need quite the level of care that a baby or toddler does. That doesn't mean leave your 1-year-old with your 3-year-old while you go shopping, but quite likely does mean they play together while you cook lunch.
Similarly this works with neighborhood kids. I would be far less comfortable with a hypothetical 7-year-old wandering the neighborhood alone than with that very same kid traveling with a pack of kids within a few years of his age.
If I'm right, what we might see in the data is more time with kids (total) in 1960 but a lot less time with each individual kid. We're taking the work away from older kids accidentally by not having a lot of younger kids for them to be around. I used to know a lot of families with 5-7 kids, and they seemed less stressed than the families with fewer kids. Families with just one kid seem by far the most stressed about raising them. I have a nephew who is an only child, and he craves/needs validation from his parents constantly. He struggles to entertain himself. In past generations he might have been better off by playing with neighborhood kids, but apparently Steam/Xbox relationships don't meet the need. So they both spend huge amounts of time with their son, maybe more than they would total with a few kids who are around the same age entertaining each other.
Of course, toddlers are their own thing. They're hard to take care of when they're mobile but can't communicate and especially when they have no concept of social rules or boundaries. Our daughter used to run towards the street a lot, for like, no reason. So we couldn't let her play outside on her own for even a few seconds. Our youngest stayed where he was supposed to, so that worked a lot better. He also had two older siblings to follow and learn from.
Admittedly I have a small sample size. But in my experience there is almost no downside to letting small children fight. They can't really hurt each other very easily (they're too small, and they usually aren't really trying to hurt each other), it seems to be a very natural behavior, and it tires them out.
You do need to make sure the area they fight in isn't dangerous: no sharp corners where heads might intersect, no heavy or fragile things that could be knocked over or fall down, etc. Provided you've done that I wouldn't intervene unless someone started crying or couldn't breathe or something.
A big part of this is that, as you've probably noticed, it is REALLY EXPENSIVE to prevent kids fighting. There might even be some learning benefit, but that's getting into bolder claim territory and like I said, limited sample size. Maybe you could ask this question on your next reader survey? "Did your parents let you fight?" Honestly if I were in your position my reader surveys would be nothing but "what did your parents do and how did it turn out"
I recall riding with my cousin in her giant SUV, the children in their car seats in the 3rd seat, and her daughter yelling to her, of her little-more-than toddler brother - "Mom, he's trying to get a piece of me!"
It was a kind of play, especially given that they were trussed up in booster seats.
Why isn't there some edu-phone option that allows some stuff and blocks other stuff?
Lots of questions about where exactly to draw the line.
On one extreme, there are lecture series on quantum mechanics that are definitely educational not brainrot, but also aren't that interesting to most toddlers. On the other extreme, baby shark.
But theres plenty of stuff in between.
You could take a phone. Leave the camera, clock, calculator etc apps on it. Add a few puzzles. (eg a sudoku ) Add a selection of music, nothing too inane. Maybe add one of those easy learn to program things (like scratch). And that's it. No internet connection. But still pretty useful.
> What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds? They can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they?
I have 4 children, 6 5 3 1, and my wife & I rarely do "primary childcare" for the 1 year old. Certainly no more than 1 hour per day. She roams freely through the house and watches life happen. She has a nanny during the week (our only childcare) that takes her to the park, library, and so on in the mornings, and who then clocks out after her nap. We obviously have to change her diaper, give her a milk bottle, and feed her in a high chair with the other kids, but she is very much along for the ride. Her physical well being just isn't much work at all. The marginal work she has added to our childcare approaches zero, and she is doing great.
Regarding screens, the 2 older kids have iPads only loaded with things I'm happy to have them use (e.g. Synthesis). They use them for about 30 minutes, 4 days a week. We don't bring iPads out of the house to restaurants or on outings or anything. It has been extremely easy to control kids screen-time.
Generally speaking, leaving kids alone in their play room or backyard to play is a common thing which is good. Doing that does not require direct supervision or involve letting them run around the neighborhood. The oldest (6) already gets himself home from the park (about quarter mile) on his own, across several streets.
My most successful approach to this question has been figuring out ways to make the time I spend with my kids more enjoyable. This boils down to a few things:
1. Prioritize activities you both enjoy: sounds obvious, but if you are spending time together either shift the activity to something you like or try to find something enjoyable in the activity your child is doing. For example, I enjoy playing with legos (even Duplo), so we do a lot of that. When my child wants to draw, I use it as an opportunity to practice drawing kanji. Etc. When you do activities you both enjoy, your child will have more fun too because you won’t be sitting on the sidelines waiting to move on to something else.
2. Related to 1, but make a sincere effort to be present. If you’re really in the moment, there are more opportunities to see beauty and joy in the everyday and mundane. If nothing else, you can turn any activity into good mindfulness practice, making it feel like time well spent.
3. Find ways to not have to be “managing” your kids constantly. I find parenting most exhausting when I am constantly trying to redirect them away from something bad. On the other hand, when we’re in an environment where they can do what they want safely, I can relax and enjoy. In practice, for the 8mo this looks like spending time to make a baby safe play area, for the 3yo this looks like having bright-line rules about what is acceptable/negotiable/prohibited so we don’t have to spend all our time arguing plus some basic discipline moves (1-2-3 Magic) when he wants to push boundaries.
I live next to a public park/playground, and from spring to fall there are a dozen or more kids playing there unsupervised, almost all the time outside of school hours. Of course that still isn't that many - public census shows that there are a few thousand kids within the neighborhood - so most parents aren't taking advantage of this pretty simple opportunity (there are a few other public spaces nearby where kids are playing but nowhere near the several thousand that live within walking distance).
It's interesting you mention the Roman Empire collapse due to decadence. Dwarkesh recently put out an interview with a well respected historian who argues that changing climate, failed harvests and diseases were the main reasons why the empire fell.
Not that this impacts the broader point. I agree with it - each new change in society needs to be evaluate on it's own. We can't generalize from the past.
I definitely believe that the smartphone and social media destroy attention spans. I used to read novel after novel as a child. I could finish a short novel in a day or two. Now I have to work up the effort to read for up an hour a day and it takes me 1-3 weeks to finish an average length novel - even one that I'm genuinely interested in.
I'm not an expert on this or anything but it's one of my hobby horses. In my view the disasters were all exogenous shocks that a healthy system should have been able to handle. Plus you'll note that plagues *help* Malthusian societies: 14th century Europe experienced an abrupt rise in living standards post-plague. The third century crisis was immediately preceded by rampant hyper-inflation caused by debasement of the currency. Basically the economy went from free-market to a tax-extractive one, and that's probably downstream of crumbling political institutions. Plus I mean just think about it: every ancient culture had to deal with the same environmental problems. The reason it hit Rome so hard was that it had become sclerotic and fragile.
"Also, I married the only centrist-classical-liberal woman left in the San Francisco Bay Area - what kind of off-the-chart-outlier genes did she need in order to pull that off? If my son inherits those genes in a male body and moves to Chicago or something, will he become the next Costin Alamariu?"
Congrats on making me lol and sob at the same time!
BTW, I met your wife at an ACX meetup and I can confirm that she's super nice. It was funny: I show up at the meetup, I see mostly men and a woman sitting by herself, so I sit next to her and start a conversation. After a while I ask her, "Almost no women here other than you and me, what brought you here?" And she smiles and says, "I'm Scott's wife." And I'm like, that'll do it!
Anyway, on to Caplan's book: Color me unimpressed for two reasons.
You gesture towards this in your piece, but I call BS on "low-effort parenting" until the child is at least 3. Newborns, babies and toddlers don't give a damn about your "free-range child" philosophy or the norms of 1950s parenting. Caring for a baby looks like this:
1. Baby goes "Waaah!" you drop whatever you're doing/awake from your nap with a start and rush over to baby.
2. You attend to whatever baby needs - diaper change? Rocking to sleep? Feeding? Burping?
3. When you're done with the above, you put baby down in their bassinet/crib and drag yourself back to the ginormous pile of dirty dishes/laundry/trash can full of dirty diapers you haven't had time/energy to deal with.
4. You say to yourself, "F**k it, I'm exhausted, I'm just gonna close my eyes for a minute, I'll take care of the dishes/laundry later, or husband can do it when he gets home from work,"
5. Return to step 1, wash, rinse, repeat, and oh yeah, do it all while desperately sleep-deprived.
Also, major side-eye to Caplan for simultaneously being like "taking care of children is super easy, barely an inconvenience!" and being like, "if you find a childcare too hard, no problem, just spend more on nannies!" Yeah, no kidding, genius, of course childcare is easy if you have the multiple tens of thousands to throw at childcare, the most Baumol-cursed part of the economy there is. Plenty of people don't have that luxury.
Is there any research on hours spent by parents on childcare for East Asian countries. There is a stronger expectation of grandparent participation which I expect would lower the averages.
To the behavioral geneticists who say we should all calm down, contrary to some social criticism, most of the work of parenting is not nurturing them to better adults, but direct care-taking: feeding, clothing, putting them to sleep, and getting them from place to place in the moment. How do you cut this?
I was 4 minutes into reading this thinking how blatant it is that Scott is the author of this review and he didn't even try to mask it before I realized that it's a BOOK review and one of his regular posts.
For me, the SRTHMK is not about saving time spent with children. Rather, it relieves my worries, that I say one wrong word and my kids will need to pay a therapist 20 years later as a consequence. Or ruin their health forever by a wrong choice of their childhood diet. Etc.
>"KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW! I’M TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON HOW EASY TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN IS!"
While this was funny, I think this review and, seemingly, the comments are missing an important and very pertinent part of Caplan's argument (IIRC). Namely, that the costs of childrearing are frontloaded and the benefits are delayed.
Infant children require a high amount of parental investment. Young children require a moderate amount, and adolescents require a small amount. Adults, and grandchildren, don't require any. But, if you ever stop by a retirement home, you'll notice that old people really, really like having grandkids to fuss over.
So, I don't think Caplan was denying that raising infants is a lot of work. Rather, there are ways to more sharply level off parental investment as the kids get past infancy, and many people underestimate the long run returns from having kids (and grandkids).
Child raising can be a lot more scalable than it is, especially in "secondary" modes. Different "nuclear families" could pool their children together, as a sort of unofficial, unregulated "playcare". And once you have older children, you might be able to get them to help you with the younger ones (even if only grudgingly). And then there's the aspect of "free-ranging": I guess I kind of had that, as I grew up on a farm where I spent a LOT of time alone, yet fortunately experiencing sufficient interactivity with others to learn human language and stuff (I had especially good relations with my extended family).
the free range kids...look Caplan, I was one too, and there is a reason why Gen X became helicopter parents. We kind of lived through some stuff that we don't tell people nor does it show up in data. Not everything bad is "missing on a milk cartoon bad."
"Oh, he's playing over with the neighbor kids, it's ok." Yeah, 8 year old me is seeing boobs for the first time watching police academy in the basement because they had HBO. Think we told? Hell no.
"Oh he's out riding his bike," yeah here i am being ringed in by neighbor kids in their bikes because they hated my face for some reason, and being worried they'd pick up stones to throw at me. Stones hurt, Scott. Kids are not nice by default, they learn to be, and they can be very cruel.
The silliest memory was going to my mom's friend from church's house and playing with their kids, who proudly showed us their ersatz porn of the land o'lakes girl done by taking the carton, cutting out her bare knees and transplanting them as makeshift breasts. 40 years and i still laugh/cringe at this.
those were mild things, there were worse that happened to me. And i was a boy, a lot of this doesn't think how harder or more dangerous it is for girls and women. keep in mind, not everything is told or shown in data.
I think Caplan needs to remember he is no Studs Terkel. Economics is not sociology and you cannot make it such. Sometimes you can only ask a particular person how it went for them, and they may not be able to say any more than "such was life."
i think parents have more control over their kids, yes. If you are giving them
unfettered internet access that's being careless. Kids services and restrictions exist.
the point is more free range kids generally also had pitfalls that don't show up in data, and parents often don't see that. its not sunshine and roses, and helicopter parenting kind of resulted from growing up knowing that.
> Still, age one is too early to try this; my kids would still run into the street if we weren’t there to stop them. Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.
They did! They had lots more kids, and the elder ones (especially girls) were expected to look after their less-independent siblings. So really you only had to go through this with the very first kid (and not even that if you could rely on nieces or cousins) and ended up doing a lot less per kid.
(At least that was how it happened in Portugal. I assume in the US there might have been relatively fewer kids, but probably still enough for this effect to be relevant)
1. In the countryside (which was most of Portugal proper until at least the 1960s) cars were a rare sight back then.
2. Keep in mind by age 4/5 kids would be expected to do light work (shepherding or picking fruits). (I don't think I'm misremembering the ages here as one of the reasons parents used to dislike primary school was taking children out of the fields where otherwise they'd be working. I could check later though)
3. Even in a big city you'd probably have this with 5yos, which doesn't change the stats much if you're having 10ish kids and so are your 10ish siblings
Well, there were a fair number of cars in the US even in the 1950s. And Scott lives in an urban area, presumably urban areas had cars in Portugal in the 1950s too.
4/5 year olds are very different from 2 and 3 year olds. A 5 year old is developmentally advanced enough where they can keep their mind on "I have to keep this 1 year old from running into traffic." A 2 year old or even a 3 year old just doesn't have the attention span for that.
No argument that older kids had to do a lot of supervision of younger children in those days, but until the eldest of your 10 kids hit that age of keeping a thought in their brain for longer than 25 seconds, someone had to keep them alive that wasn't your previous child, simply because at 2 or even at 3 they are just not capable of doing that job yet.
In Portugal in the 1950s I assume multigenerational living helped a lot. In the US, I'm not sure.
So your counterpoints made enough sense I went and actually asked my grandmother, who raised a small number of babies in the second biggest Portuguese city in the 1960s.
1. She says her firstborn was left with a "nanny" from the moment she had to return to work (unclear exactly when, but I'd estimate about 4 months after birth) until the age of 3.
2. This "nanny" was apparently a woman who worked at home as a spinner while simultaneously "supervising" between 10 and 20 kids from the neighborhood.
3. After age 3 this firstborn (a girl) was left at home with her baby sister. From what I could gather they weren't left alone all the time straight away, and for a while my grandparents worked weird hours to ensure one of them could be home a significant amount of time. During this transition period the eldest was being taught house skills so they'd do some chores while my grandparents were away. Memories were fuzzy but from what I could gather this period shouldn't have lasted longer than a year, and could have been shorter.
4. The kids weren't super safe in the house, especially while cooking. There appeared to be some assumption that neighbours would notice and perhaps intervene should anything truly serious happen. There was at least one episode when the two girls were seen operating some sort of fryer by a neighbour who thought they were not safe doing that. Said neighbour told my grandparents as much, but didn't stop them using the fryer and even had a bite of what they were making.
5. There was a TV in the house, and while there was only one channel there were some popular cartoons (but no soap operas until after the Revolution in 74, I think). They would certainly spend some time watching TV, but presumably not more than a couple hours daily unless they really wanted to watch the news or whatever grown-up programming the regime allowed during the day.
6. By the time the eldest girl was 6 the kids were doing daily cleaning and preparing the family's evening meal.
So in the end... I don't know, maybe there were such "neighborhood nannies" in the US at some point wherever relatives couldn't do that?
That's really interesting! Thanks for checking in with your grandmother, even if all the particulars are not correct due to age and the passage of time, it certainly paints a picture. It sounds like a tough life for both her and her kids.
I think a lot of what you say kind of jibes with what I'd expect -- you wouldn't leave a 2 year old alone with a baby, a 3 year old is still iffy (as is evidenced by the fact that they had to structure their work in such a way as to not leave the kids totally unsupervised just yet).
Totally unsurprised that the kids were not safe at home. In my own family (Russian) there is the story of a relative who had to leave a young child at home alone and burned their hand on the stove in order to scare them from touching it when the parents were not home.
I'd imagine in the US the "neighborhood nannies" were a thing for lower class families, but probably not middle class. To bring it back to the original topic of the post, some superficial googling shows that in the US in the 50s, only 16% of mothers did not stay home, so I think that if they were spending less time with their children, it probably wasn't because the kids were with neighborhood nannies.
Out of curiosity, do you know if your grandmother's children were formula fed?
I suppose everything is relative in the hedonic treadmill! Their life was certainly tough compared to my own and my children's. But it was not particularly tough for their context and it was probably better than my other grandparents had going in the countryside, despite children having been less disruptive to their routine there.
I'm not sure what to make of this 16% statistic... I suppose in a way it's a sign of prosperity that so many mothers didn't have to work to keep the family afloat. Who knows, maybe the real trick was actually a drop of spirits in the dummy, or hitting children if they were too much work.
I forget the details, but if I recall correctly my grandmother didn't breastfeed or formula feed everyone. But health issues may have played a role there.
If the number of children being kidnapped has remained the same but the precautions parents take to avoid kidnapping have increased by a large amount, doesn't that imply we live in much more dangerous world today?? Kids would have been so much easier to kidnap in the past, you have to do something very high risk, like pick a kid up off of their front lawn to kidnap a kid today. Perhaps the neurotics are right and it is a lot more dangerous for children out there today?
It's probably because most of the kidnappings are by relatives, who tend to know the child's schedule and are otherwise able to get access and convince the child/others that the child should come with them
Maybe I'm being redundant (sorry, didn't read all 600 comments) but the usual answer I see to "Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be."
would be a couple of tricks:
- Older siblings/neighbor kids looking out for younger kids. This still works in rural Mexico and hunter-gatherer societies, apparently. And
- Most of the moms in the neighborhood knowing each other through the local parish or the PTA or what-not and putting other people's kids in check if their behavior gets too far out of hand. In other words, a sense of communal responsibility for the neighborhood's kids that would step in to prevent vandalism or serious violence. I think you can still find this in some Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. Free Range parenting is also very popular among Utah Mormons. Might be interesting to see if they have carried on this communal responsibility approach.
When my father was 12 or thirteen, he conceived of a desire to ride his bike to his grandmother’s house.
306 miles away. (Via current highways, there was no interstate then so it would have been longer, most probably, but the roads also quieter and less fraught.)
So he and a schoolfriend did this. They did indeed carry a letter from his mother, that sufficed should anyone question them. He is hazy about where they slept, but this was long before the days of lightweight camping gear so they wouldn’t have carried tents and stuff. They may have just stopped and rested at rest areas. Maybe got a then-cheap motor court room.
A pal, a couple years younger, joined them on the other end, for the return trip, which he said was much harder biking into the wind. He recalls them trying to lighten by jettisoning their stuff, books he’d carried, and a “beautiful lady’s hand mirror” which his pal, the son of his mother’s best friend back in her hometown, had apparently been made to take so as to groom himself nicely. Also unclear.*
After 10 miles or so, the pal got to worrying he shouldn’t have thrown away his mother’s hand mirror and wanted to go back for it, and this occasioned their only quarrel.
I think he didn’t much want to ride a bike after that little adventure. So on the basis of his extensive paper route, he went to the bank - a competitor to his father’s bank - and got a loan for $300 and bought a car.
At 14.
*The hand mirror has puzzled me, about this anecdote. I’m thinking it was just an ordinary drugstore hand mirror, but perhaps gilt-painted, so that in the boys untutored eyes it was valuable if pointless treasure.
> Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds?
Low effort hypothesis for the One Weird Trick.
Stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions, and start beating your kids up instead!
Regular physical discipline seems like it might have been an efficient tool of managing children that went out of fashion since 1950s.
Not sure how one could test this: maybe compare total childcare time with countries where physical discipline is still common? E.g. single-child two-parent households in the U.S. versus similar PRC households?
> Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds?
Low effort hypothesis for the One Weird Trick.
Stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions, and start beating your kids up instead!
Regular physical discipline seems like it might have been an efficient tool of managing children that went out of fashion since 1950s.
Not sure how one could test this: maybe compare total childcare time with countries where physical discipline is still common? E.g. single-child two-parent households in the U.S. versus similar PRC households?
I've often assumed it's a consistent incremental risk preference. If the odds of all cause mortality for a 5-10 year old are 60 in 100,000 in 1950 and you allow or deny your child to undertake activity X which increases or decreases their risk by 6 in 100,000 then you have adjusted the risk of catastrophe by 'only' 10% of total risk. If the odds in 2020 are 10 in 100,000 then the same refusal improves your odds by over 50%. If there is an ongoing risk reduction over time (driven by societal factors or broader health improvement or whatever) and each parent responds to the prevailing rate, then specific actions become 'riskier' and the reward for further constraints becomes 'greater'. This doesn't require any change in relative risk preference across that period, and the effect could be triggered entirely via improvement in very basic health and safety (e.g., vaccines reducing death from disease, seatbelts reducing death in car accidents).
In the above scenario the important claim is that the perceived risk of X has not changed. This is not a Weber's Law scenario in which people 'notice' risks they would not have before due to lower background risk rates. People in 2020 do not incorrectly believe that these activities are more dangerous now than they were for their predecessors, and predecessors did not ignore the risk or believe the risk levels to be lower than they actually were. Nonetheless, since in all periods the function at play is incremental risk mitigation the reasonable decision to make regarding X can shift.
Is it unreasonable of me, as a mother of two under three, to not believe that Bryan Caplan spent twice the time his wife did with their kids per day when they were toddlers?
Or, as someone who works outside the home and employs a nanny, not to believe that his children only spent 1 hour per day with their mother?
My only real issue with this article is how he described the work it takes to raise kids. This could be just wealth envy. But its quite difficult to hear someone who has a nanny and a wife describe it as exhausting. Overall good article.
'Kai' in my language (Yoruba) literally means 'stop' or 'don't do it'. The first context you used it with uppercase style literally had me initially reading the word in my native tongue before I corrected myself.
I'm deeply skeptical of the idea that nothing you do can matter for your child's outcome.
Compare Victorian vs. modern Britain. Educated Victorians explored the world, conquered the world, astounded the world with their groundbreaking science and industry. They were proud of Britain, proud of themselves, ambitious. Modern educated Brits - the same people who ruled the world 150 years ago - get performatively angry about right-wingers getting angry about nationwide immigrant rape gangs.
Even if you thing this is a positive change, the change is still there.
Does this really have nothing to do with education and upbringing? If you got 5000 British families to LARP 24/7 as Victorian elites, instilling Victorian virtues and ambitions in their children, sending them to schools with the same curricula as 19th century Eton and Cambridge... would this not produce a radically different outcome for the children of the 5000? Even if it were just one family, if they produced a compelling enough narrative, could that not affect their child's future?
There's really no unexplored world left to explore and conquer (space is prohibitively expensive and also dead). Where would you expect them to go? Frontier science and engineering are just way too hard for most.
The post hints but doesn't state that there are selfish reasons specifically to have more kids closer together rather than spaced out.
There are economies of scale: fewer total years spent juggling infant/toddler care with work, better sibling synergy, and fresh memories of overlapping phases (vs. restarting from scratch after forgetting how exactly you gave birth or fed an infant in the first place). Infection risk works like this, but moreso. The whole household gets a huge health boost from keeping the whole brood out of institutional care until everyone ages out of immune fragility on one end and/oor starts to hit compulsory schooling age on the other.
So quick, chat me up about methods before the baby wakes up!
It feels very right to me to have a big kid and a little kid. Like that was part of the wish of kids (Kinderwunsch), the sibling dynamics, the different stages at once. The experience of having a family and growing it. Everyone benefits.
"If you ask parents whether they’re happy, you get different answers depending on what exact framing you use; it’s kind of a tossup"
Yes, I've always thought asking parents if they regretted having children (if that's the work you're alluding to) was actually asking parents if they were prepared to admit to others that they regretted having children. A totally different question. If I had kids I would never even admit to myself that I regretted them cos I wouldn't want to go down that road.
Glad to read this, I was in the same situation a year ago - rereading the book that convinced me to have children, in hopes that it could tell me what I'm doing wrong with my toddlers. I used to quip that I've just worked a hundred-hour week, a hundred weeks in a row... but now that was sixty weeks ago.
> Sometimes I would not want to hear terrible nursery rhymes and would turn it off. Big mistake. My son would scream at me until I changed my mind; eventually I stopped even trying.
I don't know if you've read the parenting literature but the big mistake you're making here is failing to "control the environment". You don't turn off the keyboard in front of your son. You disappear the keyboard while your son is sleeping so they can never play with it again.
And yes keeping screens away from toddlers seems like an important part of "control the environment" to me. As a compromise, we do allow listening to audio books over a smart speaker. For some reason that seems to be much less addictive than screens.
We're wired to get 90-something percent of information via or eyes, so it totally makes sense. Also, even smart speakers are way less interactive, especially for a toddler
R.E.: laptops. My girlfriend was in a lecture a couple of years ago, and during the lecture the professor received an email from one of the students in his class. He stopped the lecture and loudly announced "please stop watching porn".
One of the students in his class was literally watching porn on his laptop during the lecture.
I will never understand how the Bryan Caplan who wrote a whole book about how children will turn out basically the same no matter their nurturing somehow decided to homeschool all his children and pay for expensive 1:1 tutoring. It’s almost like he doesn’t actually believe his own book.
I don't believe childrearing ever was much easier in the past, though secondary factors (more tight-knit communities, lower standards, etc) might have made it somewhat more so for the average mother.
It's hard. It's as hard as it can be without bringing us to extinction, which you would expect of a species with no natural predators.
When they get older the work becomes less direct care (thought that doesn't go away if you want to bond with and educate them), and more organizational. I spend a lot of time dealing with schools, camps, extra curriculars, playdates, doctors, therapists, household management, grocery shopping, meals, etc, now than I did when they were babies. These are things that are hard to outsource, because we have preferences about them. Granted, I am dealing with children with special needs, which complicates matters significantly, but I think a lot of this is baked in. Bryan Caplan would probably say none of it matters and just let them veg at home on their devices, but I think he is just wrong here.
I also second the response that toddler + phone = nightmare. I could go on a long rant about how each of my kids responded to various technologies - but the short version is touch-screen very very bad, computer better if supervised (IE, no YouTube holes), and TV/Nintendo least problematic of the screens. We have a system where they need to earn screen time by reading, writing, or cleaning, and this has been working reasonably well.
I was coming down here to write the same thing. Obligatory ACOUP link: https://acoup.blog/2020/02/07/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-iiia-by-the-princess-irulan/
We don't define decadence because we don't want to establish it as a concept without being able to pin blame.
That might sound weird or too reductive, but think about what decadence is in popular conception: the populace has high expectations and takes peace and prosperity for granted, the people in power are gaming the system, the engagement and sense of shared stakes is evaporating, and so on. You can't talk about these things without an angle. Are we saying that people can have it too good? Horrifying conclusions you can draw from that. Are we saying that corrupt and shiftless leadership is to blame? Better, but a fair bit of writing about leadership during periods of decadence centers on leaders being milquetoast and not changing enough, so you can end up endorsing leaders who are cruel and overbearing if you don't frame it right. Shared stakes? Sounds like nationalism, driving conflict.
Decadence is real. The catch 22 is that a specific definition for it is really hard to formulate and impossible in politically turbulent times, like while you're in the decadent culture.
If you think Rome in 476ad and Rome in 100ad would have had a similar response to tribal invasions, I guess you could deny decadence had anything to do with it. But I doubt it would work. At the very least, you could say that Rome had a more aggressive and cohesive identity in the earlier period, and then you have to work through what that means. Citizens should have rallied behind the leadership to prevent any incursion, but is it the citizens or the leadership that failed, or became complacent?
Expectations can still factor into it, and so can corrupt leaders, operating in a different kind of corruption. Yes, it's complex. We research complex historical phenomena all the time, with the usual result being oversimplified narratives. But there are a few topics, like this or the definition of feudalism or more recently the decision to drop the bombs on Japan (thank you Chris Nolan) which bring up a bunch of ire and elude honest conversation. It's a problem of historiography, and the subject is not popular to tackle. There are trends, and decadence doesn't fit the current ones.
That's exactly why it would be beneficial to have a definition for what decadence is. I honestly don't know how to measure or define the cultural differences over this span of time, and no one else does either. The more detail you go into, the harder it is: economics could be part of it, as cliometrics is incredibly difficult, I know. The legitimacy of "fixed" expectations would likely be part of it, too: that revolves around prevailing narratives and how people respond to violations of social norms, which would almost certainly be impossible to measure. Tricky stuff.
But I think you're asking for more proof than should be necessary, then begging a question to make it seem like I'm making the leap here. That's not right. The most basic history of Rome indicates clearly that Rome didn't mobilize to save the empire from the Germanic tribes in 476, where it threw thousands upon thousands of men after victory in the Punic Wars, where the stakes were less immediate. There IS a difference.
And we don't really seem to want to talk about it. Many theories have been put forth, and some of the factors at work probably should be included in a good quality definition of decadence. But discussions of the fall of Rome mostly push lots of small, diffuse reasons why it happened, including now climate change and immigration, nothing more holistic. I think there's a reason for that, and it isn't because decadence doesn't exist.
Rome's final years are characterized by barrack emperors and economic decline. It faired best when its emperors got into power through (fairly) peaceful inheritance.
I like you bringing up the punic wars, but you omit that a substantial portion of Italy defected to Hanibal during the invasion. Rome's history is full of delicate coalition building.
Finally, any claim about the West's decline that does not adress the East's future golden age and 1000 year long lifespan is unconvincing to me.
Yeah I found that passage a little obnoxious honestly. Especially "I’m not enough of a historian to know whether everyone was wrong until 476 AD ..." , which kind of implies he is enough of a historian to take as given that Western Rome collapsed due to decadence.
Sure, Edward Gibbon supported it, and media like Gladiator have cemented it in the public imagination—but dismissing decadence and moral decay as the primary cause of the fall of Rome isn’t some fringe lefty revisionism. It’s the mainstream scholarly view.
There's something weirdly circular that Gibbon (among others) reads Roman conservatives and early Christians that Rome was morally bankrupt, concludes then that this must be related to the decline, the meme spreads, then many modern conservatives use Rome as a key exemplar/evidence of the dangers of moral decay.
Sir, we have a new requirement for your substack. All posts, no matter the topic, must have adorable kid pictures liberally interspersed between paragraphs.
Seconded!
👍
Oh God, no. Interesting blogs go all to hell when baby-mad posters start splicing in pictures of their young'uns between talking about whatever their ostensible subject is. If Scott wants to talk about his personal life, fine, but I hope he'll try to keep it in separate posts, apart from the policy/history/philosophy/commentary stuff that drew many of us here. And sure, I accept that sometimes a bright line can't be drawn, as in the case of this post.
We will have to fight a duel to resolve this disagreement then, because my philosophy about internet commentary adheres to the ancient school of Babies Are Awesome And Important Enough To Intrude On Everything-ism.
What if they were small icons used as drop-cap (the fancy first letter of a paragraph) at the beginning of each section?
Or if they were somehow appropriate to the topic area? Like dressed up in Roman helmets for a post about Rome?
I like how you guys think
These are our virtual godchildren, we have a legitimate interest in how cute, smart, advanced, wonderful and amazing they are and having a record of same 😁
Seconding this. I don't mind the personal posts, they're still interesting, but baby pictures are about as disruptive as popup ads; every one of them yanks me out of the essay's flow because I have to suppress Suddenly Squick.
No, please. I'm reminded of this Family Guy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoqZBqabnow
We're all hardwired to think our kids are just the most beautiful, wonderful things. That causes parents to WAY overshare to the point it becomes annoying. Kid pics are fine in essays related to children, but please don't put them everywhere.
It doesn't have to be YOUR kids, I'm hardwired to think that almost everyone's kids are sufficiently wonderful that I want others to celebrate them, and to share in their celebration.
If you make a new post on (https://voltairesviceroy.substack.com/) that has incisive commentary AND adorable pictures of your (or any) wonderful kids I will happily subscribe.
Yes I was on Facebook in 2009, why do you ask?
And that would double as more exposure for the blog when it inevitably ends up as a rage post on /r/childfree
they are the most fun to troll
Interesting to finally reach the bottom and see this comment at the top. I removed the baby pictures as I went using uBlock's element blocker (the one under the table was ok though).
Seconded.
I thought Caplan's book was pretty terrible because the vast majority of it was "here's another twin study saying nothing you do makes a difference". But that's not motivation to have more kids! He almost never actually addresses the actual title of his book!
As far as I could tell his actual reason boils down to "I've heard being a grandparent is pretty great so you should have more kids to maximise your grandparenting".
Felt like a complete failure of a mismatch between title and actual contents.
I thought his argument was something like: suppose you are currently on the fence about having another kid, because kids are fun and cute but also a lot of work. Twin studies show that most of the work doesn't matter. Therefore, you can do less work than you think, and that should push you off the fence into having the kid.
I agree this doesn't work if you're not on the fence for that specific reason.
That's what I meant by mismatch between title & contents. Imagine you bought a book titled "Reasons to Own Lots of Cars" and all the book actually had inside was tricks to get a 20% discount on buying cars. You'd think, "you haven't actually given me positive reasons to own lots of cars, maybe you should have titled your book 'If you want to buy lots of cars, here's how to get them cheaper'".
In more economist terms: Caplan's cover says he will address the demand-side but his book is actually about the supply-side. What's more he assumes demand is reasonably elastic but there are reasons to be skeptical of that. Studies show lottery winners (and other exogenous wealth shocks like an inheritance) don't have more kids, despite claiming cost was the reason they didn't have more kids. Millionaires don't have more kids than hundred-thousand-aires. Billionaires (other than Elon Musk) don't have more kids than millionaires.
That makes sense, although I think Cremieux has written about some recent research suggesting that child subsidies do have a small (on an individual level) but significant (on a social level) effect on fertility.
See my comment above, but: You CANNOT "do less work" for a newborn/infant/toddler, unless you enjoy the "WAAAAHHHHH" of a neglected, hungry, wet infant in the background (or unless you outsource most of the hands-on care to said infant's eight-year-old sister, I guess).
I think you can in some cases. For example when our kid was around 1 year old we gave up on "sleep training" and just let them sleep in our bed. Ended up being way easier, and honestly, I think it has made them better adjusted. I think the whole "toddlers must sleep alone" thing is a WEIRD western imposition.
Totally true.
My husband read this book and the idea that stuck with him was "think about how many kids you want at age 60", that is, don't overrate the infancy years and discount the much more plentiful adult children years. I think people really do make this mistake too often so that idea was worth $4 on thriftbooks. Anyway now we have four kids.
That's good advice.
The problem is that you only have the kids at age 60 if they don't hate you, and doing whatever makes your life most appealing might make your kids hate you.
Is there a reason to expect your children hating you is particularly correlated with a more hands-off parenting style? I tried to look around and didn't find much compelling data on this question in any direction (especially about how your children will view your relationship as adults), but I also didn't look that hard.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of "I hate my parents" cases seem to come from:
1) Very high expectations/standards on the part of parents
2) Very strict/authoritarian parents
3) Some sort of strong ideological or belief difference (liberal kids and conservative parents as well as atheist kids and ultra-religious parents being the biggest ones), typically coupled with a refusal on the part of one side or both to 'agree to disagree'.
None of these seem strongly linked to a hands-off parenting style, and I would argue #2 is probably inversely related.
The absolute worst case "My parents are very neglectful" stories I've heard are the only ones that seem to spark hatred, and go far beyond 'chill out and parent like someone from the 50s' and more 'active disregard for the child's continued existence'.
Doing whatever makes your life most appealing isn't necessarily the same as hands-off.
Things which make your life more appealing might include:
- Trips to destinations you are interested in and the children are not, even if they involve extensive transit time or more of a culture clash for the children than for you.
- Not changing plans when kids are sick.
- Pushing children to not make a fuss about your friends visiting, even if your friends insist on touching the children in ways they don't like / bringing kids or animals who are obnoxious to your children / etc.
- Visibly buying expensive luxuries for yourself and skimping on things that dramatically affect your children's lives.
These behaviors can be pretty memorable to kids.
I will conclude by saying that, if you have the money to routinely go on overseas vacations, you have the money to make sure that your child has somewhere to store medications whose instructions say to keep between 15-30°C.
"you have the money to make sure that your child has somewhere to store medications whose instructions say to keep between 15-30°C" this seems oddly specific and I'm sorry it happened to you or someone close to you.
That said,
"Visibly buying expensive luxuries for yourself and skimping on things that dramatically affect your children's lives"
seems the only really egregious one and I'd say it's orthogonal to hands off parenting. Maybe correlated but bc of a third underlying factor (the parents' coscientiousness), there is no reason why one needs to be neglectful when being off-hands.
I'd add that within limits, both
"Trips to destinations you are interested in and the children are not, even if they involve extensive transit time or more of a culture clash for the children than for you"
and
"Pushing children to not make a fuss about your friends visiting, even if your friends insist on touching the children in ways they don't like / bringing kids or animals who are obnoxious to your children / etc"
are good for the children and usually fondly remember when they grow up. I don't think I ever met an adult who was like "god I really hated how much my parents always made me visit museums and old towns". It's usually seen like one of those things good parents are *supposed* to do, for the child's benefit.
And that's also assuming that your kid isn't making your own life a nightmare well into adulthood.
I haven't read the book, but one of the themes I remember Caplan hitting pretty hard on his blog about parenting around the time he wrote is was the three outcomes where parenting style (within a window where the parents are neither neglectful nor abusive) did seem to make a difference were:
1. Parent's happiness during the kid's childhood
2. Kid's happiness during their own childhood
3. Quality of their later relationship as adults.
I don't remember details, but I'm pretty sure Caplan's conclusion on all three points was that they cut in favor of his parenting style. IIRC, he was contrasting his style with that described and advocated in Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (also published in 2011), and Caplan's take was that his relatively hands-off and permissive parenting style was a lot more pleasant in the moment for both parent and child, laid the groundwork for a better relationship with them as adults, and made little or no difference to other life outcomes compared to Chua's strict and hard-driving style.
But do his kids play violin well? Did they graduate Yale? It really depends what life outcomes we are choosing to measure, doesn't it? The Sudbury Valley school did a 20-year retrospective, and found that most of their graduates were not working white collar jobs. They said this was okay, because they are aiming to maximize happiness, not income. But at least one interviewed graduate was stressed because being a line-cook was not conducive to having a family. Sure, he was doing what he loved, but depending how you measure, he was not necessarily happier for it.
Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld are both law professors at Yale. I'm guessing that children of couples in similar situations have a pretty good baseline of outcomes in terms of academic achievement and early career success through combinations of heritable traits, culture, and children benefitting from their parents' personal and professional networks.
Bryan Caplan is an econ professor at UVA and I think his wife Corina is a lawyer at Freddie Mac. This parenting combo also seems like it would be correlated with a high base rate of academic and early career success regardless of parenting style, but not quite as a large an advantage as Chua and Rubenfeld's situation.
Caplan's children are also quite a bit younger than Chua's. His two oldest children are currently undergraduates, I think. At least he posted something in 2021 about them both being accepted to Vanderbilt with full merit scholarships. If they finish their degrees in four years, that would have them graduating this summer.
Yes, I think we can all agree that having two college professors as parents leads to better outcomes, regardless. The question is whether either methodology can be generalized successfully to the public at all socioeconomic strata, and which works better. I think there's something to be said about the fact that many rising middle class parents choose the more intensive version, perhaps thinking of their own upbringing and concluding that letting kids run free doesn't always lead to the most tangible or measurable results.
The benefits of free ranging are generally less tangible or measurable. My question about "who plays violin" was specifically pointing to a highly measurable achievement, one that often results from a more intensive parenting rather than a free-ranging one.
One thing to recall is that Professor Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is intentionally quite funny and self-satirical. It's less intended as a self-help book than as an entertaining look at a growing segment of American elites (or of the next generation of American elites): East Asian tiger parents. As an upper middle class Southern Californian, I was familiar with the milieu before the book came out, but now I have a verb "Tiger-mothering" to explain what I'm talking about to others.
Thanks for adding that. I haven't read it and most of what I know of it is filtered through Caplan. If he talked about it being self-satirical, it failed to stick in my memory.
She was definitely mocking herself. At one point, she's upset to find that their dog is too dumb to become "accomplished". Her conclusion is that she could have chilled out significantly and had just as good results. But considering that her level of chill at the start is in the deep red, it's not entirely clear what she considers the optimal level of chill (it could still be significantly less chill than the average helicopter mom).
I'm in the middle of it now, and it's incredible depressing and flippant. Literally nothing you do will ever matter. Genetic pre-determimation is the *only* factor in child development. If you're an alcoholic your kid will be one too, so don't bother trying to teach them otherwise. If you and your partner are Green New Deal Democrats you don't need to bother teaching your kid your morals, they'll turn out just like you regardless of what you do because natural selection predestined your genetic code to have specific beliefs about American corporate tax rates. Nothing matters, so don't bother giving a half a shit beyond your own personal happiness.
It's like listening to Sam Harris talk about how free will doesn't exist and no one has ever made a decision in their lives - everything is predetermined. You're entire being is nothing but a mechanical input-output machine that neither you nor your parents nor anyone else has any control over. It's obviously false and insufferable to listen to. I guess I'll keep listening, though, because I'm destined to and nothing matters anyway.
"If you're an alcoholic your kid will be one too, so don't bother trying to teach them otherwise."
It's just a probability not some absolute course of events.
What matters is making your own life and the life of your children enjoyable (well, their life in your presence).
Have absolutely overrated the infancy years and decided to have fewer kids. When I hit 8 years without sleeping through the night, 8 years without making it to the gym consistently, over the course of 3 kids... well, those infancy years accumulate, you know? I don't know what those kids will be like when I'm 60. They may end up being a total waste of my time and life force. Better to focus on helping these turn out okay and forget the unborn ones.
Yes! My wife was often caught up in whether we wanted another **baby** when in the longer term that's only a tiny portion of a parent's job!
Caplan says: it is like "an offer of a 20%-discount coupon for chocolate: Sure, for customers who don't want any chocolate: no use." - But the title is SRTHmoreKIDS. So, clearly not for those not into any.
Actually, grandparent *is* pretty great, so you should have more kids to maximize your grandparenting.
-- A grandparent
That also implies you should have kids young. Or you might be too old to grandparent.
That is absolutely true. As for me, it's already too late (older son born when I was 35). But by George, that when *their* time comes, they'll have every possible help to have *their* children soon. Or sooner than that.
Yeah I mean it wasn't a simple narrative but a long list of reasons. I thought the twin studies were a key framing for two key arguments. One was parents should put in less work because of twin studies, but the other was if you care about having children with very successful material outcomes, as the imagined tiger mom might, then it still makes more sense to have more kids for more genetic dice instead of over parenting one. I think the second one is weak since most parents aren't that hardcore about child success, but it does push against the vibe of working super hard to make your kid successful.
Louise Perry of the "Maiden Mother Matriarch" podcast recently had demographer Lyman Stone on to discuss the fertility crisis, and child raising in general. The discussion at the beginning was largely Stone explaining the discrepancies and nuances in the various "Time spent on childcare" datasets and is well worth a listen. He mostly discussed the primary vs secondary childcare issue, but his main thrust was about child-as-subject childcare (which has increased) and child-accompanying-adults childcare (which he think as declined).
The other major point he discusses which I found very interesting was co-childcare (so, other parents or friends looking after your kids) and playdates, which both hugely help with the burden of childcare (as kids with other kids can entertain themselves). Whole pod worth a listen but the first 20 minutes or so are most relevant to the questions Scott raised here.
Seconded on the value of this. Although I don’t plan to change any of my parenting based on it.
With large families (more than 3 kids?) "kids with other kids entertain themselves" can be the kids in your own family.
In the past, when people lived close to their parents, you could also include the cousins.
Yeah I'm surprised this isn't brought up more often. Older siblings raising younger siblings must surely been common until not long ago?
Well, everyone who attempts to bring it up ends up eaten alive by a swarm of angry older brothers/sisters who loathed having to take care of their younger siblings.
But I see that attitude a lot on the internet, to an extent that I got an impression that this turned into the same sort of taboo letting your children roam freely is.
I have 4 younger siblings and I loved spending time with them as a child and as a teen, up until I moved out of my parents house to go to Uni. But also I had a stay-at-home mom (not at all common), and my oldest sibling is only a year and a half younger than me, so it's not like I had to put in that much work.
I hear a lot about the oldest child ending up having to do basically all the housework and childcare on their own, and while I have no doubts some of the reports are exaggerated, some must be true. I imagine that it gets especially bad when the family has other problems (really poor, one parent missing, alcoholism/drug use in parents, etc etc).
And that's where the hostility to the idea comes from, probably?
>Well, everyone who attempts to bring it up ends up eaten alive by a swarm of angry older brothers/sisters who loathed having to take care of their younger siblings.
Older brother here. It didn't bother me. I would invent games for us to play together.
Can we gather representative data somehow?
> Can we gather representative data somehow?
Yeah, this. I grew up in a big family, and am planning to have a big family, so was definitely counting on this effect (as well as nannies, maids, etc).
I'd personally bet on it being something like a Reddit / ACX split, where Reddit strongly selects for less successful, more resentful, more online people.
If you read Sarah Hrdy's Mothers and Others, alloparenting has been a big deal for literally our entire existence as hominins, and was arguably a major factor in allowing us to become human.
One parent bearing the brunt of childcare and raising is pretty far outside the norm, and this HAS to be influencing fertility rates downward.
But also, because older sibs helping to take care of younger ones has been a stable feature of our evolutionary landscape for at least 2M years, I'm not too worried about relying on it.
My younger daughter has a best friend who lives across the street. We made a WhatsApp group for the 4 parents, and we mostly just post like "going to playground today at HH:MM". She has never spent voluntarily so much time outside (e.g. today 17:00-19:00 without parents). One weird trick to have a quiet afternoon at home.
I absolutely loath "child accompanying adult" childcare. I'm about to go shopping with my 4yo, and I know that half the trip will be me saying "no, we don't need that, we aren't going to buy that, don't take it off the shelf" and then me putting it back on the shelf or finding it in the bottom of the cart at checkout. In theory I want my kids to participate in daily activities of running the household, in practice, they are negative assistance til they're 6 or 8 and then they aren't interested any more.
I think the idea is that if you let your annoying, slow, messy kid help with tasks when they are 4yo, then they will be competent and motivated to help when they're 8. It's an investment that pays off later.
I started parenting with the intention of doing it this way, but I think if you're not a stay at home parent and don't have unlimited time to do things at a 4yo's pace, it's just pretty much impossible.
I have seen that theory: that if you let your 4yo help, then they'll still be helpful when they're 8 and 10. In practice, almost nobody I know has been able to replicate this. I think the answer is obvious: the kids being cited as examples that this works are all girls in mono-cultural villages. In my opinion, what is actually happening is that they are moving into their social gender role, which is doing chores. If you do find someone who says it works for them, I'll make a bet they live a fairly isolated existence, eg on their homestead, where they can control the culture to match their demands and expectations.
I wonder if you're doing this with the wrong "mood". How would a parent deal with this in a hypothetical past where they brought their young kid to the local market? Would they run after their kid, putting all the vegetables and produce and meat back in the stall of the local farmer telling them "we don't need this", "no put it back" and so on? That feels disrespectful and gross. No, I image they would explain the _seriousness_ of the situation to the child, and react with the appropriate gravitas when the child inevitable does do that. Stopping them, and very very solemnly explaining that this isn't our stuff and we cannot touch it. And if it doesn't stop, immediately leaving and bringing their kid with them. I imagine the kids in such a culture would very quickly regard the local market stalls with reverence, obviously knowing they can't just grab whatever they want from them. Even if they're four or five.
I think this is mostly a cultural "technology" we've lost. But it's not an unsolvable problem with the right approach imo.
Why are we assuming people brought 4yos to the market with them in this hypothetical past? If one lived on a farm or in a remote village, then going to the market was a privilege you earned by being useful on the trip. In a hunter-gatherer society a toddler might come along on a trip -- or be left home with elders for babysitting. And if they did come along, it was usually with a group of women, so someone could keep an eye on the littles.
Sure maybe they did or maybe they didn't, but my argument doesn't really hinge on that question of fact. Obviously children can be taught proper reverence for things with the correct cultural attitude in other contexts. My idea is that "no you can't have that, *sigh*" with an eye-roll or whatever (not accusing you of any of this) is the wrong attitude and is obviously (at least from the outside it's obvious) enabling the behavior.
Sure, and obviously 4yos are trainable (not sure you can say the same about 2yos). But it has to be a fight you're willing to fight (because my 4yo has a lot of fight in him) and also a fight you have time to fight. That is: you need to have the option of walking out of the store and potentially not coming back until another time.
Yes I completely agree, if you don't have the time and will to do that, you absolutely should not bring your 4yo to the store.
(but also you'll be completely fucked if you never do it because you're neglecting to raise your child)
I think this is one of the super decadent things about western culture that will be a major reason for societal collapse if we don't get our acts together soon: we don't regard this as _the_ most important thing, the thing with the highest priority in our lives. We just bring our 4yo to the store and expect them to behave but aren't willing to put in the time to raise them, to teach them, because we're.. what, too busy? Too busy doing what exactly, that's more important than that?
"as kids with other kids can entertain themselves"
This obliquely raieses a point which is a mystery to me. It seems like a huge challenge for parents is the fact that the child needs to be constantly "entertained"; this job either falls to a caregiver (exhausting) or to a screen (possibly rotting their brains), creating a constant dielmma for the parents (or, seemingly rarely, the child can be entertained by other children).
As far as I can remember from my own childhood, when I was at home, my parents would do certain activities with me, but I would also spend a lot of time playing alone or with my younger sister while one or both parents were around but doing other things. Granted, some of that time I was watching television or on the computer (screen). I was not "free range" by any means, but I did have free run of the back yard.
I'm trying to figure this out; maybe I just don't remember all the time they spent entertaining me; maybe they spent a lot of time entertaining me during the hazy years before, say, age 6, when I don't really have good memories of what my life was like, and I became more self-sufficient after that; or maybe something really has changed since then, either with today's parents or with today's kids, or with both parties. Maybe this is exactly what Lyman was talking about when he said that "child-as-subject" childcare has increased. But why has it increased?
I don't have kids, so I'd be curious to hear from parents, and maybe especially grandparents: has something actually changed over the generations in this regard, am I probably just not remembering how much my parents interacted with me, was my family unusual, or what?
(I just came up with a crazy theory. Nowadays, we've forgotten what play looks like. For adults, recreation=content consumption. Even "experiences" feel like another form of content now. Life is always either work, chores, or recreation. Parents instinctively think "the child is not working or doing chores, therefore must be provided with content; this can come from me entertaining them or from a screen, and those are the only options". The child picks up on this, and forms an expectation. I'm just spitballing here, parents are obviously welcome to explain why this is completely wrong)
I haven't listened to that podcast (I'm aware of the people, just can't get into podcasts as a medium).
But my hypothesis is that secondary childcare has decreased, and primary childcare has increased, because there's less housework being done by parents.
There's been some outsourcing to roombas, housecleaners, prepared foods, lawn care services, and overseas textile factories.
But standards for homemaking are also much lower now. I think this is a good thing (Selfish Reasons to Be a Homemaker"?). I have heard that many people in the mid 20th century used to vacuum their carpets every day. I expect there are historical reasons why extreme cleanliness was so prized then: the 19th century engrimification due to coal smoke (see the book review of The Domestic Revolution at Mr & Mrs Psmith's Bookshelf); the development of germ theory; the former prevalence of hired maids among the upper middle class vs. 20th century rising labor costs; the invention of the vacuum cleaner and other labor-saving devices. Anyway, by the mid 20th century, people really relished being able to get their house spotlessly clean. Nowadays we don't value that as much. So we can sit down and read a book with our kids, or take them on a walk, rather than completing our daily vacuuming rounds while the kids do who knows what.
Good piece and cute kids .. until you salted it with Jordan Lasker's racial pseudoscience. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/03/natal-conference-austin-texas-eugenics
Factor in white hs and college kids using AI to replace critical thinking, and the stats will get even worse without having top blame immigrants and browns https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html
I actually think it's pretty important to pay attention to racial demographics when assessing education statistics. For example, the US underperforms most other countries in test scores. But broken down by race, the US overperforms those countries (for example, US whites do better than whites in Europe, US Hispanics do better than Hispanics in Latin America, US Asians do better than Asians in Asia, etc). So the entire US performance gap is an artifact of racial demographics. And that means that there's no point in trying to mimic the seemingly-superior Finnish or French or Japanese education system. If you refuse to look at racial demographics, you'll get confused and start sending teams to study "the Finnish miracle" or whatever.
I strongly suggest not relying on Guardian articles for anything, their whole point is to confuse and outrage you in the exact way that you seem confused and outraged here. If you don't believe me, read one on a topic that you know a lot about and it should be obvious.
I’m not confused. And the guardian has one of the best investigative teams in the business.
I think this is true only in the sense that KiwiFarms has once of the best investigative teams in the business. They are good at finding dirt on people, but this is not itself an admirable act unless you try to use it to make the world a better place, rather than just smearing anyone you dislike with a mix of real and fake dirt in the hopes of making them so scared and miserable that they stop talking.
independent of any direct opinions on the guardian (im mostly neutral on them because I dont read most of their stuff), this is interesting as an epistemological stance. I feel similarly about CNN, for eg.
What do you replace <the set of sources like the guardian> with? Or can such things be excised with no loss of generality in ones world model?
My own view is that for the sort of person who reads ACX, we are in an epistemic golden age. If you have the facility to discriminate good faith writing from bad, then the *quantity* of informative, edifying good faith content on any given topic is far higher than at any time in the past, whether that's on Substack/blogs, other independent creator platforms like youtube, high-quality magazines like the Economist, the Atlantic, the FT, etc.
Opinion pages are, essentially, useless -- longform analytic writing like you get in magazines or blogs is much better than short op-eds/editorials. You can cut them out of your life entirely and end up net-better. In fact, replacing ones you don't like with ones you agree with is probably actually *worse*. Ideologically agreeable slop is poison for the mind.
None of this has to do with factual, daily news reporting, where you should realistically probably get a subscription to a mainstream, high-quality legacy newspaper and have a cultivated smattering of various high-quality info sources you like to read on social media, with a low but non-zero tolerance for error. To be frank, the best option here is still the New York Times -- I am aware that everyone here hates them for the aforementioned op-eds/editorials, but no one is making you read them! -- but there are plenty of other choices as well. A high quality legacy newsroom has a very low error rate, and if your analytical diet is strong any egregious errors will surely become clear to you in time.
For people who *aren't* itching to read longform blog posts and lack the kind of epistemic discrimination and critical thinking necessary to determine whether a source is healthy or poison, the current era is of course a deeply confusing disaster. But I think over-identifying with these people and the resultant excess of sourcing caution is a common failure mode among people who are honestly more resistant to this kind of thing than they credit themselves with.
Yea this makes sense and I agree.
My own information diet tends to be something like "a combination of high level real-time sources that I have no particular allegiance to [nyt, ap, reuters are the most common], often sourced from links people send me or hackernews" + "deepdive interest areas [scotusblog, various ml paper sources like deepmind/anthropic/oai]" + "blogs of people that I trust [acx, money stuff, stratechery]"
Having a healthy information diet is tough though. I was caught in the r/TumblrInAction hellpit for a while a few years back, for e.g. and it took a lot to get out of there. The problem is that identifying problems with your epistemology is quite difficult in general
>What do you replace <the set of sources like the guardian> with?
You don't, unfortunately. On most issues, those are as good as it gets. You just need to know that there's a set of topics (race, sex, gender) that our culture is insane about, so there's no generally trustworthy source.
> I’m not confused
Well there's your problem then. You should be. Anyone who can look at all this data and not be at least a little bit confused isn't thinking about it carefully enough.
I don't think the US underperforms "most other countries". Maybe you meant "most other OECD countries"?
I accept your correction (those are the ones that mostly do the standardized tests).
PISA covers over 80 countries and I think that's what people normally talk about for international comparisons isn't it?
Huh, I usually only see them reported for OECD, but I guess I am wrong.
Usually, serious comparisons in western media are made between developed countries, ie OECD. Most gulf states take part in TIMMS and PISA, but their (abysmal) results should not give us comfort. Nor do we care much to learn about Peru or Vietnam.
I read about the Finnish system, felt: yep, just like my German schools were. But like many (most?) OECD-countries, classes have changed a lot in the last decade(s). Hardly a class in primary school with more than a few "traditional" names. On parent-meetings, I may be the only native-speaker. The school were my brother teaches: no teacher takes on a full teaching load anymore. Too hard.
I don't have any first-hand experience on the German education system, just some impressions and second-hand info from people who had lived there. From this, I got the impression that in Germany, the school system has a touch of 'caste', in the sense that pupils are put into paths (e.g. who can go to university) quite early on. I have even less info about the Finnish education system, but from that info it looks just the opposite. I would be interested in your take on this.
>Hardly a class in primary school with more than a few "traditional" names. On parent-meetings, I may be the only native-speaker.
Are you saying that the German education system is being overrun with immigrants? Is this universal or is it specific to a particular region or segment of society?
I would like to know - how reliable is this race/ethnicity and IQ argument advocated by people like Cremiuex or, more polemically, Sailer?
I read "The Bell Curve" years ago, and was intrigued but skeptical. If it is true, though, it is critically important. It implies that the reason we can't solve so many political problems is that society refuses to come to terms with essential facts. I'm also not so sure that the fact would lead to political solutions that conservatives would like, even though the IQ discussion is most popular among the political right. If your economic circumstances are largely determined by a random genetic IQ lottery, it supports a Rawlsian view of justice and implies that a radically redistributionist socialism may be more moral than a libertarian system that maximizes individual choice.
My own experience, and here I'm largely not talking about race, is that people have inherent limitations and I guess this is roughly what people mean by IQ. I have taught mathematics and there are some people who just don't get it even though they try with a sincere effort. Those people would generally be considered high IQ and even they are reaching their limit. To navigate life in general for people who are average or below-average must be incredibly frustrating. No wonder there are so many conspiracy theories - people at that level just can't understand how the world works so the modern world is literally a result of magic wielded by the illuminati. To the extent that this is correlated with race, it explains a lot of other problems also.
But many people say IQ is all BS and that none of that is true. You can do anything if you put your mind to it and my experience with mathematics is just that I suck at teaching.
I believe in the IQ argument about 80%. You appear to believe in it, which lends it more credence. I'd be interested to know what you (or others who have investigated the matter in more detail) find most convincing.
I don't know of any good public discussion on this issue. The tiny amount that gets attempted gets really heated really quickly, without the sort of honest back-and-forth that lets you identify flaws in one party or another's thinking.
If you're interested - which I don't recommend, it tends to make people crazy - the best sources are the ones from before the academy banned the topic, especially debates between Arthur Jensen (hereditarian) and James Flynn (anti-hereditarian). If you try to go more modern than that, there's very occasional discussion in the journal "Intelligence", and a small hobbyist race-and-IQ Substack blogosphere - Emil Kierkegaard is close to the middle, and you can find the others from his recommendations section (I don't know of anyone who puts a huge amount of work into presenting the other side, although Sasha Gusev has some decent genetics blogging from a mostly anti-hereditarian perspective). But "Intelligence" got captured by ideological liberals last year, and the Substackers are all ideological conservatives, and AFAICT they're all just repeating their own biases without engaging with each other much.
From what little I have read from him, if Kierkegaard is close to the middle, I kindof wonder how extreme the most hereditarian writers must be.
Sorry, I meant "central node of the social graph", not moderate.
Some people find my anthology "Noticing" to be public-spirited, good-humored, and sanity-inducing.
Others find themselves driven insane by rage at their inability to refute my logical arguments.
if you are likely to find yourself driven insane by rage, please don't buy my book.
This is a wonderful comment after 20+ years of the Rationality community battling it out over IQ and HBD.
You can accept a Rawlsian conclusion if you want, but it certainly isn’t obligatory.
Also it’s very much not a “random genetic lottery.” Were it random, that would make the politics easier.
Incentives still matter and redistribution comes with many downsides.
(Also it’s not the Illuminati, it’s Jews.)
>Rationality community battling it out over IQ and HBD.
Eh, it has generally ran away from that stuff screaming. Those daring to delve either went off the deep end quickly, or kept mostly quiet.
>it’s Jews
And Asians, increasingly.
FWIW, reading _The Bell Curve_ was a major part of my becoming less libertarian and more amenable to various ways to keep the poor/uneducated/underclass from getting ground up in the gears of the system.
If you want an argument that isn't racially-suspicious, you should try Freddie deBoer's work. He argues pretty cleanly that "academic achievement potential" is relatively fixed and that nothing schools can do will alter that. And he comes to the same Rawlsian conclusion you do, that this fact supports decoupling academic achievement from the ability to have a materially-comfortable life.
I think it's worth noting that Freddie deBoer is actually arguing that he thinks the position of various groups of students relative to each other is essentially fixed, and no amount of educational intervention can create an egalitarian distribution of intellect. For him, this question of relative status and potential to be in the class of 'academically successful' individuals is essentially the entire sum of the debate, because for him the primary concern is how society uses intelligence as a moral basis for the capitalist distribution of scarce resources, and I think if you are predisposed to thinking about things in a class stratification and redistribution frame that the Rawlsian liberal mindset tends toward, this is a tempting way to see it. Nevertheless, I think of it as an extreme error.
But it's very important (as part of this post shows!) to note that the *absolute* achievement of a student is *not* fixed, and that actually both their lives and the lives of everyone in society are improved by trying to improve absolute achievement. The 'race and IQ' group actually believes this very strongly and use it to explain the Flynn effect and the relative success of American racial minorities compared to their native countries. The COVID experiment proved this pretty much beyond a doubt, with school closures simultaneously reducing test scores across the board yet also hitting already-successful students the least. If you're Freddie deBoer, this is hard proof that academic interventions don't matter, because without access to school the same relative positioning of various groups remains basically the same. But if you actually care about *how much stuff children know* this proves school is incredibly important.
Right. It turns out that the children of the white collar Laptop Class could more or less sort of get by with Zoom classes during covid, but the children of the blue collar class benefit quite a lot from going every day to an organized environment where they are talked at by middle class grown-ups.
As approximately everyone knows but some won't admit, we end up with malinvestment and wasted human potential via anti-tracking/gifted and anti-order/discipline policies when edu policy is set by blank slate race-IQ and race-personality denialists.
> It implies that the reason we can't solve so many political problems is that society refuses to come to terms with essential facts.
That is definitely the case, not only about IQ. The first step to solving a problem is to admit that you have it...
> implies that a radically redistributionist socialism may be more moral than a libertarian system that maximizes individual choice.
This is tricky. I support the idea of dumb people living happy lives... for the reasons you mentioned. But I don't support the idea of dumb people collectively deciding the future for everyone.. because, obviously, they will make dumb decisions which will ultimately hurt everyone, including themselves.
Socialism is better at feeding the stupid. (Unless everything collapses and everyone starves.) Libertarianism is better at letting the smart do the smart things. (Unless the corporations get them poisoned by lead and addicted to smartphones.) I dream that instead of debating the dichotomy we will somehow figure out a system that combines the advantages of both. Something like flat tax and minimum bureaucratic obstacles for the smart, unconditional basic income and social services for everyone, and some rules that prevent the smart from exploiting the stupid (no drugs and gambling and usury).
> But many people say IQ is all BS and that none of that is true.
Many people say that the Moon landing was a hoax.
Do you believe that mental retardation is a thing? If not, the best argument is to go visit some place for the mentally retarded and observe them. They are real.
The usual counter-argument is something like "yes, *low* IQ is a thing, but *high* IQ is a myth". (At that moment, you may notice moving the goalpost, because before mentioning this argument, even the low IQ wasn't considered a thing.)
You can see the high IQ at kids: some of them grow up mentally almost twice as fast as the others. Some of them spend the first years of the elementary school completely bored, because everything that it taught there, they have already learned at the kindergarten age -- without their parents pushing them. (Note: I don't consider answering someone's question to be pushing. Or reading them a story that makes them interested at something.)
You can see the high IQ at adults, as some of them can understand complex things at the speed of light; plus they have wide knowledge and interests as a result of spending a lot of time understanding many things fast.
The usual counter-argument is to blame all of this on privilege and/or hard work. "The kids are smart only because their rich parents bought them a ton of stimulating toys! And expensive tutors! And they are probably good at school only because their parents, obsessed with success, are making them practice homework 10 hours a day." And... well, yes, there are some kids and parents exactly like that.
But there are also kids (I have two such kids at home) who just grow fast on their own. I don't think that our toys were more stimulating that anyone else's in the neighborhood. My kids had their computers since they were small, but many other kids had theirs, too. (The other kids who had computers typically spend their free time playing Minecraft or Roblox. My kids do vector graphics and code in Scratch.) We never hired tutors, and the good school does not explain the difference between my kids and their classmates. Arguably, *I* am a good teacher, and from this perspective my kids had a privilege to have me as their parent. Yeah, that is probably a part of the story. But another part is that this configuration works so well because the children are a bit like my small copies. Otherwise, things that seem interesting to me, might seem boring to them (as they seem boring e.g. to their classmates). With regards to homework, I check that my kids do it the first thing after they return from school, but otherwise I don't care. I don't even check the homework; I just ask whether it is done. As long as my kids keep getting good grades, I am not going to micromanage their education; I am too lazy for that. -- As a summary, I attribute the progress of my kids mostly to their own innate abilities, which get some nudging and support from the parents, of course. But many other kids have supporting parents; that doesn't explain why my kids keep winning so many competitions without trying hard.
From outside, it would be easy to adopt some "sour grapes" fantasy, and start believing (without any evidence) that if my kids get good at school and win competitions, it must be because as a crazy ambitious parent I am ruining their childhood by making them work hard. If you could see our everyday life, it is more like the opposite. The kids do their homework and then play most of the day. They only read when they want to. They only listen to me explaining some interesting things when they want to. If they say they don't want to join a competition, I feel somewhat sad about it, but I am not pressuring them.
When I talk to adult people, some of them have the "spark", and some of them seem just... unable to get interested in nontrivial things. Here again, the IQ denialists could blame it on education. But I got most of my knowledge from books and internet. So you would have to explain why I was so interested in seeking the knowledge in the first place.
You won't get a pure experiment. That would require, among other things, to take kids away from their families and have them randomly adopted. Without that, you can always argue "it was their innate skill -- no, it was the parenting". And I would say that yes, high-IQ kids benefit greatly from presence of other high-IQ people in their life... including their parents, of course. But that doesn't mean that in a different family they would be exactly average.
(I hope we are all smart enough here so that I don't have to add the usual disclaimers about how IQ is not everything, sometimes hard work is just as much important, some people really are privileged, the environment matters, etc. All of that is real, of course. But the question was whether IQ is real, and based on my accumulated half century of evidence, it is my firm opinion that, *obviously*, yes.)
And, yes, we need to fix education; currently it is horrible. But one of the horrible things is that it artificially slows down the high IQ kids. While most other kids are pushed forward against their wills, the high IQ kids are often pushed back. And if we changed schools to some hypothetical perfect institutions where each child could advance according to their abilities, I believe that most kids would advance faster than today, but the smartest kids would advance *much* faster than today, so the distances between the kids would *increase*. (My kids could probably learn twice as fast as now, without working hard, if I homeschooled them. But then who would pay my bills?)
I believe that you have probably already noticed that some people are capable of having a nuanced perspective on a complicated topic, and some people are not. That, too, is related to intelligence.
This is a good comment - well written, informed by your own experience, doesn't try to argue too much. Thank you.
Second Rogerc - fantastic comment.
I've never understood the societal scandal and disconnect here:
1. Different people have different innate abilities.
Obvious to anyone with eyes / children / any experience with other people, uncontroversial.
2. You can group people by various criteria, and then those groups will differ in innate abilities.
A basic mathematical consequence of grouping and transitivity, but now you're treading on shaky ground, eyebrows are starting to be raised.
3. Regardless of whether some of those differences are genetic / heritable or environmental / cultural, the traits are mutable or immutable to a certain extent via our societal institutions and current set of interventions, and we can roughly quantify the degrees that they are mutable / immutable, in both individuals and groups, for given traits.
Genetic studies, twin studies, adoption studies, 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation immigrant studies, and more, but now you're beyond the pale in polite society, you have spoken something that shall not be spoken, this is both thoughtcrime and wrongspeak, and if you publish on this, or even link other people to published research, you will be cancelled.
But, it literally shouldn't matter whether something is genetic or environmental, it should matter how much a given trait is "mutable / immutable according to our current state of knowledge and interventions," because that's the extent to which you can move it with public policy of any sort. That's the frontier of actionable knowledge, and we should be acting on and making policy according to that frontier.
Do things look 60-80% genetic (heritable) today because we have no repeatable interventions that actually move the needle? Sure. Is that written in stone? Absolutely not - as our knowledge improves, as our interventions get better, as some societies start gengineering, more and more of that heritability could come to be influenced by culture, environment, and specific interventions, we literally don't know.
This dynamic is frustrating, because public educational policy literally shouldn't care about any split in points 2 or 3 up there, because way back at 1, which nobody has a problem with, we should be tailoring our educational regimes to different abilities, regardless of the origins or splits or groupings, or whether it was innate or from parenting.
All that matters is that it IS true, and not why.
And at the societal level, we should obviously construct things such that 1 is taken into account too, regardless of etiology, and unleash the high capability people, and take care of the low capability people, once again regardless of mutability / immutability.
Justice and desert are poor concepts to base a society's public institutions on, because faceless bureacrats and byzantine organizations aren't equipped to judge justice or desert to a good enough standard, and it's arguable whether that's a desired moral end to begin with.
To be pedantic: I don't think (2) holds without a correlation between the grouping criterion and the measured variable. Cars vary in top speed, but grouping them by colour will not lead to inter-group variation in top speed when the groups are sufficiently large.
So I don't think it's fair to say (2) is a mathematical fact - it has to be due to a specific biological or sociological claim (which of course is the thing under debate).
> So I don't think it's fair to say (2) is a mathematical fact - it has to be due to a specific biological or sociological claim (which of course is the thing under debate).
Honestly, I'd prefer a scenario where people did some sort of unsupervised clustering like k-means to just see what reliably pops out, instead of even going in with a sociological or biological hypothesis - no claim required.
But you're right, *correlation* is required, to inform public policy. Hypotheses aren't rquired, at least until you're at the "intervention" stage. And you'll notice that it was only AFTER exhaustively testing a bunch of interventions and discovering that nothing moves the needle that all this became thoughtcrime.
Because "some traits are relatively immutable" bothers people from a philosophical perspective, we're literally wasting hundreds of billions per year collectively pretending otherwise and making school an entirely pointless waste for smart and dumb kids alike. That's not a good way to do things.
Is it tragic? Sure. Should we make sure the less capable are taken care of? Absolutely. But we shouldn't harm the *most capable* just because we don't like the fact that some traits are immutable - all technological and economic growth is driven by them, and that lifts everyone up, and grows the pie overall so you can support everyone to a better standard.
Just imagine if we actually put half the resources we spend trying to drag bottom quintile kids up unsuccessfully on gifted and talented programs and tracking for the top quintile kids.
Right. Odd vs. even Social Security Numbers should have virtually identical IQs.
I've often wondered about day of the week you were born on? Do doctors still take Wednesday afternoons off to play golf? There are not insignificant differences in the number of babies born on different days of the week, presumably due to when doctors prefer to schedule caesarean operations. That could have some lifelong impact, if say, babies born on weekends are more likely to be full term than babies born on Fridays.
The main issue with any type of socialism to flatten equality is that it makes everyone poorer long term, including the relatively poor, because of misallocation of capabilities.
I don't buy the claim that socialism is better at feeding the stupid, there's no evidence it's better at feeding anyone (and plenty of evidence for the opposite). It's a system that satisfies some type of itch for there to not be any rich people but where everyone is equally comparatively poor instead. It's not even about making decisions but about what very rich people actually bring; innovation and efficiency.
Then again, even in socialism the smarter people will get much more, it will just happen through black markets and social influences instead.
We should really stop pretending that free markets are zero sum, people becoming rich, even absurdly so, is a good thing, even for the poorest.
>If your economic circumstances are largely determined by a random genetic IQ lottery, it supports a Rawlsian view of justice and implies that a radically redistributionist socialism may be more moral than a libertarian system that maximizes individual choice.
But genetics are not random, but dependent on parents. And a moral system would then incentivize high-productive parents to get more high-productive children (so more can be distributed).
Btw: the same is true if it is not nature, but (family) culture.
Radically redistributionist socialism would make everyone worse off regardless.
Like, nobody supports capitalism because it's so fair anyway. We support it because it's efficient (better to have an unfairly small slice of a big pie than an equal slice of a tiny one, which is what you get under socialism). Some of us also because we consider freedom more important than fairness.
I think another important factor is that it's minimally interventionist. The less the state is involved in the economy the less politics becomes about territorial battles over who gets to put their fingers in the pie. Regulation also makes economies more fragile and less adaptable. In the words of Hyman Minsky, stability is destabilizing.
I'd put that as one of the reasons for the efficiency.
Fair point.
In my view it's beyond reasonable doubt that hereditarians have at least a reasonable point. Even before you get to specific studies their position explains the large-scale patterns in the world much better. For example: if everything is environment then why haven't racial gaps changed at all over the last 80 years in which the relative absolute environments have changed dramatically? Why don't those gaps close at high SES? Why is the current consensus on the impact of shared environment on IQ between 5 and 10 percent? How does environment explain the very specific and reproducible regression-to-mean data? And why has there been close to zero dose-response relationship in 60 years of very funding-intensive educational interventions?
>It implies that the reason we can't solve so many political problems is that society refuses to come to terms with essential facts.
Yes it would explain ... quite a lot about society and politics. Think about who benefits when there's a politically viable justification for having large interventionist and redistributionist policies.
In any case, here's a good introduction to the peer-reviewed literature on the topic: https://x.com/iointelresearch/status/1549416261075062785
Enjoy.
I just reading started a short summary book by science journalist M Philippe Gouillou, "IQ: From Causes to Consequences." So far it looks good and is up to date through the middle of 2024. It's available on Amazon, both in French and in English translation.
I would be interested in a link/cite to read more about this:
"For example, the US underperforms most other countries in test scores. But broken down by race, the US overperforms those countries (for example, US whites do better than whites in Europe, US Hispanics do better than Hispanics in Latin America, US Asians do better than Asians in Asia, etc). So the entire US performance gap is an artifact of racial demographics."
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732087511327908128
Note that the scores of other countries are not disaggregated by demographic. Here is the comparison with the scores of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants removed.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732244687929360434
It's not strictly accurate. See my comment here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons-to-have/comment/117407740. More accurate would be that the US *overperforms* most countries, but is actually far more exceptional when demographics are considered.
I pointed that out back in 2013: American 15-year-olds actually performs pretty well on the international PISA test. Asian-Americans did on average about as well as the top East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, clearly trailing only the stratospheric Singaporeans. White Americans did better than most European countries other than Finland (which has since fallen in performance). Hispanic Americans outperformed all Latin American countries. African Americans solidly outperform the small number of black Caribbean countries that take the PISA, such as half South Asian Trinidad.
Americans _do_ pay a lot of taxes per student to achieve these results. Only Luxembourg is as free spending among PISA-taking countries.
But the conventional wisdom that America has terrible schools by world standards is wrong.
How does that look when you account for wealth. Do median or low income whites in the US do better than their counterparts in France, Germany, etc.?
https://ncee.org/assessing-financial-literacy-pisa-shows-disadvantaged-students-in-u-s-perform-behind-peers/
The US has more wealth dispersion than other countries. Probably that's because we have a more meritocratic system and so wealth more reliably reflects IQ differences. Also we have a much more ethnically diverse population than most countries.
1. What does “wealth dispersion” mean?
2. You’re assuming both causality and meritocracy.
3. How are you defining/measuring meritocracy? You seem to assuming that wealth=meeit, which is demonstrably untrue.
4.
Not sure comparing by race makes much sense, though. In the US, as far as I know, the ratio of immigrants in white elementary school pupils cannot be that high, while in Germany, for example, it must be a lot higher.
(It is hard to find actual numbers, especially numbers which make sense to compare, but e.g.: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-issues/migration/Sii2024--Germany%20(ENG)%20%E2%80%93%20v6%20(FINAL%20with%20bookmarks).pdf
page 7:
"[...] intra-EU free mobility still accounted for around half of the 640 000 immigrants who entered Germany on a long-term or permanent basis in 2022 according to the OECD’s standardised migration statistics (not considering the beneficiaries of temporary protection from Ukraine). Most of these immigrants from the EU have come from Central and Eastern Europe for employment reasons."
Central and Eastern Europe is like 90+% white; 99% if you include gypsies.
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-issues/migration/Sii2024--Germany%20(ENG)%20%E2%80%93%20v6%20(FINAL%20with%20bookmarks).pdf )
>For example, the US underperforms most other countries in test scores
The US doesn't underperform most other countries in test scores. E.g. in the 2022 PISA, it scored 18th out of the 81 countries listed here: https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/pisa-scores-by-country
It only "underperforms" relative to its high economic level. That is, among the 11 countries with the highest GDPs / capita included there, the US scores 7th in PISA.
Still, even without demographic adjustment, that's not really an underperformance, as the US is 6th in GDP capita among them. [GDP per cap numbers are for 2025, and other measures like AIC per cap might be more representative, but the basic picture should be roughly the same].
> There's no point in trying to mimic the seemingly-superior Finnish or French or Japanese education system
The US actually outscored France in the linked PISA results without any demographic adjustment.
I similarly wonder about PISA outcomes of Slovakia. How much are they getting worse because all the kids are getting dumber, and how much is just Roma communities growing?
Unfortunately, it is illegal to collect data on similar things here, so... we keep talking about the superiority of the Finnish system.
We should take care in excusing our schools' performance because whites (or whatever) do 'ok'. The question is: how efficiently are they doing it? What negative experiences (enforced boredom, age based academic rails, world-is-ending fearmongering) are kids subject to the system subject to, or positive experiences are they deprived of (outside/rough play, free choice of learning topic/rate)?
I suspect Finland has some pretty good ideas for de-stressing life.
Maybe but Finland shouldn't be used as an example of educational success anymore, as they aren't even doing particularly well.
If Lasker is so worthy of serious consideration and respect why does he tweet anonymously?
I was anonymous for the first ten years of my career. The two reasons are - because if you write something people don't like, they'll try to call your job and get you fired. And second, because if you write things a journalist doesn't like, they'll write a hit piece about you, and then every person you interact with forever (like patients, customers, etc) will be like "hey, aren't you the person who the news says is an evil Nazi groomer?" and even if you're not, that's a *lot* of awkward conversations to spend your whole life holding.
Even when this doesn't happen, I think it's harder to be brave and say what you really think under your true name, and it's a relief to be able to avoid those kinds of considerations.
I thought about writing under a pseudonym when I started getting paid in 1991, but I didn't know how to cash a check made out to a pen name, so I just used my real name. I live in Los Angeles, so, fortunately, nobody cares that I'm a nanocelebrity on the Internet, because they sometimes see real celebrities in the movies walking down the street. So I'm virtually never pestered in real life.
Still, I advise young people to just pick a plausible-sounding "Mark Twain" like pen name. Life is very long, so it's hard to anticipate all the hassles that intellectual notoriety can bring.
Perhaps worth considering the possible connection between online anonymity/pseudonymity and hit pieces published by the Guardian like the one you linked. For another example see: Scott Alexander and the NYT.
If the Founding Fathers were so worthy of serious consideration and respect, why did so many of them write anonymously?
I’m not sure which founders you’re referring to, but I’m sure they had their reasons. I’ve got no problem with pseudonyms but if you’re going to inject ideas into the mainstream discourse you ought to have to courage to put your name behind them. Journalists do it all the time. Want to see the hate emails and threats I get? I’m still standing. Buck up kids.
Presumably referring to founders like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers
Someone has never read the Economist.
Or thinks it must be a worthless rag.
People are always trying to psy-op their enemies to be brave and walk into the gunfire.
It does occasionally work.
I've been commenting under variants of the name TGGP since I was a teenager, blogging since 2007. There is virtually nothing online under my real name. There is no upside to me using my real name, whereas whenever I write as TGGP people who've read me can more easily associate that with what I've written before. Twitter is FAR worse than blogging, but Cremieux writes long-form Substack posts.
IMO you are one of the most recognizable pseudonymous internet figures; apropos the Moldbug discussions in the comments of other posts, it was a comment of yours on IOZ's blog that directed me to Moldbug for the first time; this must have been in 2009 or so.
So, for me at least, you have indeed built up a personal brand under your pseudonym that is recognizable over 16 years(!)
What does TGGP stand for anyway?
My guess would be the same thing xkcd stands for.
"Xenophilic kings cause drama?" Huh. How do you get that from TGGP?
Obviously, it's "Tolerant governors generate pandemonium".
xkcd really looks like it's supposed to stand for some expression in Chinese.
For example, I once tried to register mdzs.com and it was taken. I went to see what was there and it was a URL-for-sale page in Chinese extolling the value of having a web address that was so convenient and easy to remember.
The Great God Pan is my guess. Good to know he’s still with us.
Correct.
Decades ago when I was signing up for an account on the Through the Looking Glass forum, I had recently been reading a collection of Arthur Machen (after first reading S. T. Joshi's annotated H. P. Lovecraft and noting which authors Lovecraft cited), so I used the name TheGreatGodPan. At that and other computergame forums people started condensing that to TGGP, and the rest is history.
Right. TGGP is a recognizable brand on the Internet.
How is the answer to this question not so obvious as to warrant not even having to ask it?
The chronicle of Higher Ed also did a much longer piece on Laskers research colleague Pesta. Is the chronicle also what you would call a purveyor of “hit pieces”? Sometimes Nazi groomers actually are Nazi groomers…
Academic sources can’t be biased on culture war issues?
In 2025, that’s your argument?
It's very very very rare that someone described as a "groomer" is actually a groomer.
Bryan Pesta, a tenured professor, recently lost his job for co-authoring a landmark study on the 100 year old question of whether IQ among African-Americans varies with degree of racial admixture. (Margaret Mead wrote an excellent critique in 1926 of early IQ-admixture studies and offered a better approach, which finally became technologically feasible in this century with DNA scans of ancestry.)
Which "better approach" did she offer? She was strictly against the concept altogether. It is true that it is possible to do this now but if anything Mead would've been against the modern conception too. She was completely swallowed by the ideology of cultural determinism and claimed there was no biological reality what-so-ever to race in any sense.
The alternative is… what?
Pretending like it’s completely impossible that people coming from countries that have demonstrably lower performance can impact the average performance of the US? You don’t have to bring in genetics to think that it’s possible that changing demographics, which can bring changing cultural attitudes about education, might impact average scores.
It very well may not be the actual cause, but if what is a plausible explanation can’t be discussed because it’s allegedly racist, you’ll drive truth-seeking people to the side you hate if it ends up being the actual explanation.
Let me preface this by saying I don't really get them race science people. Sorting races by IQ is like sorting elementary schoolers by penis size: sure, there's an objectively correct ranking, but unless you're in a CG set by Haruomiya or Orange Powder, you've got better things to do than trying to find it.
That said, I am disappointed by that article you've linked. It says nothing of substance and is a gossip piece of the lowest order. Wow, did you hear that so-and-so is a naughty, naughty man who got punished by this college? How scandalous! Did you know whats-his-face is a purveyor of discredited theories? Discredited by who? Through which data? Who cares, they're bad evil people and all their ideas are bad and you should hate them. Speaking of data, I thought that's what counted in rationalist cycles, not who you are and what you did. I don't care if you're the CDC or Fabius Bile, if you make a good argument from good data, I will say thank you, please creampie my brain again.
This kind of zero-effort piece ought to be punished by Streisanding whatever it's trying to smear. In service of this, I will now read the whole portfolio of this Creamy Mami person (assuming that's what his name means in English, I am not about to utter the Black Speech of Mordeaux in these hallowed halls) and find out for myself whether he's right or wrong.
Scott must be getting popular because each post seems to attract someone who thinks they're the first to say "um, be careful, you don't want to be associated with someone who is associated with someone who is associated with someone who the SLPC called a Nazi", unaware that if this argument worked it would have worked 10 years ago and this place wouldn't exist.
They're always bewildered when their magic words don't work.
> Sorting races by IQ is like sorting elementary schoolers by penis size: sure, there's an objectively correct ranking, but unless you're in a CG set by Haruomiya or Orange Powder, you've got better things to do than trying to find it.
It's only important or relevant because some people keep sorting races by wealth/income/success and using the disparities as evidence that the less successful groups must be being oppressed by the more successful groups.
If we could all agree to politely ignore the difference in outputs then I think we could also reasonably agree to politely ignore the difference in inputs.
Sorting people by who their ancestors were seems to come naturally to humans over at least the 5,000 years of recorded history.
In America, the government spends a fortune collecting data by race. In France, the government bans collecting data by race.
Yet, both seem to have relatively similar racial problems.
"Let me preface this by saying I don't really get them race science people. Sorting races by IQ is like sorting elementary schoolers by penis size: sure, there's an objectively correct ranking, but unless you're in a CG set by Haruomiya or Orange Powder, you've got better things to do than trying to find it."
What?
Your example has no relevance to anything but differences between groups potentially being heritable changes how these things should be taught about and what policies should be used completely. It's extremely important.
I find that it changes surprisingly little, in terms of policy.
If group A has more horsepower than group F, and ingroup dynamics work like they should, A will monopolize resources that F would otherwise access. We can correct this by taking A's stuff and giving it to F. Sometimes A will create value by using their horsepower better, but we can account for this too, so that A has the extra stuff they create (which they deserve) but share the rest evenly. In effect we'd have social programs that prioritize F, but A would still be better off in the end.
The pro-race parity folks, while arriving there through very strange paths, created a world in which we take stuff from A and hand it to F, but A still gets more resources in the end. There are still kinks to be ironed out, but the results are not so bad.
As for teaching, nobody really teaches that stuff because if you say anything other than "all races have perfect parity at everything" in academia, you will explode.
Why are all your posts about Trump?
> over ~ten years of relevant childhood (I’m assuming babies can’t get into white vans, and nobody wants to kidnap 17 year olds)
Can you really not imagine any reason why Bad People would want to kidnap a 17-year-old? Particularly a healthy, attractive, 17-year-old girl?
I think at that point it's a different crime than kidnapping, and I would be very surprised if there were more than a handful of cases that follow that pattern.
Perhaps update your priors on human trafficking?
Can you enlighten us? If there are ~100 stranger danger kidnappings per year, how can there be much human trafficking? Do they not fall into that category for statistics?
My impression, from talking to colleagues who fight trafficking, is that the victims are not yanked off the street. Instead they are tricked into a vulnerable position by people they know and trust. Once they have, say, moved to a new city for a promised job (e.g. cleaning offices), they are coerced into turning tricks.
Does this ever happen to rich white non-immigrants? I have to admit I had never given any thought to the possibility that my kid or the kid of anyone I know would be human trafficked no matter how badly I failed at parenting.
I have not heard of it. In order to get into a vulnerable position, you have to be low on resources. Someone whose parents put them through college is not going to move out of or across the country for a menial job - they will ask their parents to pay their rent for a couple of months.
It almost happened to my 15 year-old daughter, who was nearly tricked by some folks in our neighborhood. Don’t know if I’m rich, but we’re solidly upper middle class. Hard data is hard to find, here’s one report: https://www.mccaininstitute.org/resources/reports/a-six-year-analysis-of-sex-traffickers-of-minors/
When I was a kid, the grandson of J. Paul Getty, the world's richest man, was kidnapped, held for ransom, and had his ear cut off to prove the kidnappers were serious. Ridley Scott made a pretty good movie about it recently.
In this century, however, kidnapping for ransom, like skyjacking, seems to have disappeared from the list of things that people are worked up over.
You mean Liam Neeson lied to us all?
But yes, that's always been my impression as well. There's never been any shortage of pretty white girls who will eagerly accept a vague offer of a job in Not Appalachia and Not Moldova, and whose parents cannot afford lawyers or private detectives, and it's *much* easier and safer to just recruit from that population.
> I think at that point it's a different crime than kidnapping
Maybe it's just a matter of semantics, but I would call it "a different crime in addition to kidnapping."
Kidnapping for ransom seems to have gone way down since the Lindbergh Baby era. I can recall reading numerous true crime kidnapping for ransom stories in the Reader's Digest 50-60 years ago, but it seldom seems to come up anymore. Apparently, the FBI has figured out how to catch kidnappers.
Most of the Amber Alert warnings I get these days seem to involve custody disputes between the two biological parents.
All of the reasons you might want to kidnap a 9-year-old also apply to a 17-year-old. There are additional reasons available for the 17-year-old; you might want to enslave them.
These same reasons also apply to people over the age of 18. The plot of episode 4 of Hawaii 5-0 revolves around the kidnapping of a lounge singer who has become estranged from his parents.
The reason you might avoid kidnapping a 17-year-old is that they are likely to resist, which can cause problems for you.
That's the thing about kidnapping, it makes a marvellous plot for a crime show or movie, but it's a lousy crime to actually commit in terms of risk-reward ratio.
Most serious crimes are, which is why they're generally "heat of passion" sort of deals, while successful kidnappings require premeditation, cool head, etc.
Most of my childcare hours are in the evening or weekends, and I enjoy most of it. It really just putting the kids to bed that raises my stress levels.
Especially my 4 year old daughter. She just goes through this amped up high-energy phase. The other day she was especially rebellious and crazy and we went outside for a bit to change the situation and she played on the swing and her personality was WAY different when we went back inside.
My wife just started working nights so the evenings are all me, but if I can get my almost two year old to bed (which is easier, sometimes) and then go outside for a bit with my four year old, I think the before bedtime period could improve.
I am very very lucky that, despite a tough infancy, after they turned about one year old my twins are now a delight to put to bed.
...as long as we never, ever try weaning them off the bottle.
"...as long as we never, ever try weaning them off the bottle."
Eh, by 25yo or so they'll grow out of it on their own, you can wait for that.
My twins were also not weaned from the bottle by 1 year old. And the nighttime bottle was the last one to go. But I think in the end it was a non-issue. I remember we went on a vacation at 1.5 years old and we kept on buying little milk packets from the store because we thought they still needed a bottle to go to bed. And they never drank much. After we saw that, I think we stopped the bottle without too much of a fight.
Oh also around 1.5 was the first time where they could entertain themselves for a while: they kept on assembling duplo blocks and only when they had finished a big massive brick would they bring it over to me to disassemble so that they could start over. I remember marveling at suddenly not having to pay constant attention.
In my experience the necessity of weaning them artificially is unnecessary. Toddlers organically reach a point where they want to feel Big, and avoid the trappings of babyhood as a point of pride of their own accord.
As a parent of two, I can comment.
The older one required his bottle to sleep until ~2 years
The younger one left it entirely on her own way before.
2 years seems like a lot of time... and now, all of that is 5 years into the past. Time is strange in middle age. In any case, soon (if not already) it will be just plain milk, and toddler's teeth tolerate it well, and are temporary in any case. Don't fret too much about that.
There's a certain saying old people around me tended to use, which could be translated roughly as "nobody goes to [mandatory military service] doing that". Here in Spain, that used to be males, aged 17-19, and is no longer true, but then, the spirit is more or less correct. Most things come and go on due time. Relaxing and letting things be makes one's life easier (and prevents family drama).
I mostly don't mind looking after my 9-month-old, I just hate that I don't have time for my hobbies anymore.
I wish I didn't have to work. Weekends are great, my wife and I each get a couple of hours to do things away from the baby, but normal working weekdays are just drudgery.
The hobbies thing is a bummer. I really want to re-watch some movie classics but I can't. I've been listening to a podcast about movies (mostly 80s, 90s, 2000s era) because I have a long drive. But I haven't actually watched a full length movie in 4 years. Quickly realized the other day that Guardians of the Galaxy is not little kid appropriate. They waited until Groot showed up and then it was on to something else.
my wife and I watch movies in 45 to 60 minute chunks. We can rewind at the beginning of a session if we forgot the context. It’s not as great as watching the whole thing in one sitting, but I much prefer to not watching movies at all.
Work, hobbies, kids -- it seems like the day barely has enough time for two of these.
We've done this every night for a year with my 3.5 year old, it's a complete godsend.
"What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds?"
I think things like doing the grocery shopping / other errands with them in tow, or doing household chores and letting them "help", or maybe socialising with your friend and their one-year-old.
"KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW! I’M TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON HOW EASY TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN IS!"
This reminded me of the Thomas Hood poem, which I expect you can identify with:
https://allpoetry.com/A-Parental-Ode-to-My-Son,-Aged-3-Years-and-5-months
That was excellent.
I think writing this post counts tbh.
> I got them a toy keyboard-like-object once, the kind where you press a button and it plays terrible nursery rhymes.
At night, when silence finally descends upon the house, I start having auditory hallucinations of the “kick-and-play piano gym.”
My parents used to have a toy saxophone for the grandkids that would play some horrible tinny song if you hit any of the dozen buttons on it. Always the same song. And nothing you could do would stop the whole song from playing. If I heard that song today I'd probably start feeling like I was back in Nam.
Anecdotal, but I'll be interested to hear if this bears true for others - I have four kids, two boys and two girls, one of each in their teens. Two things have held true throughout:
1. Every age is easier than the previous age (even taking stereotypical teenage issues into account).
2. Every age is way cooler than the previous age!
Parenting only gets easier and more fun!
I agree, but then we are both guys. Moms seem to take the early trouble much better than the teenage-estrangement. (My own mom was and is perfect and perfectly happy with kids upto 7 or so - then it goes downhill.)
Agreed that my wife put in a ton of work, especially early on. But that just means that the benefits from kids growing easier to manage has accrued mostly to her!
I think the person you replied to was trying to say the opposite: that in his case, mom *preferred* the early age work as opposed to the late age work, because while the early age work was more physically taxing, the late age work is more emotionally taxing (think dealing with rebellious teen), and in their case the mom preferred a physical burden to an emotional burden.
The person agres, but if I may add: what to the moms seem an emotional burden (heartbreaking at times), does not appear much of a "burden" to me. I am more: yes, they are growing up; yes, those teens are having a hard time; yes, in their struggles, they do not give shit about us parents. But: Yes, great, they are growing up! I don't want my three years old to stay the sweetie he is - and it is not for not having to change diapers.
My kids aren't teenagers yet but this is clearly going to be us too. I was so happy to have them start becoming more independent so I could have some free time back. But my wife interprets them being less needy as them loving her less.
Agreed! My oldest is seven and it's so cool how interactive he was compared to six or five or earlier.
This has held true from 0-3 in my experience.
> 1. Every age is easier than the previous age (even taking stereotypical teenage issues into account).
13 or 14, sure.
16 or 17, no.
I haven't seen that to be true in my experience, my oldest is almost 17 and requires the least effort while contributing the most to our overall family success. Of course all kids are unique and maybe we just got lucky, but the trend holds across all four.
I think every age is easier than the previous age *up until* (pre)teenage years: it's true from 0 - 10 or 11. At that point things become harder than they were since, well, sometime before 5. I am assuming it gets easier again but I will have to report back on that.
Again this is anecdotal, but that hasn't been my experience; 16 is easier than 14, which is easier than 12, etc. Especially when factoring in second-order effects, older is easier (and more fun!).
The difficult part in teenage years mainly applies to about 15% of them (also happens to coincide with personality disorders). For 85% or so of people any age increase means more ease.
My female kids tended to have more meltdowns between the ages of 10-15 or so, then got easier again afterward. My male kids didn't show that pattern.
Almost entirely agree, though 8-12 is my favorite range. Every age is definitely easier in many respects, depending on how well you do with teenage independence and not overreacting to the bad attitudes.
8-12 they still think you're amazing and know everything, and it's a lot easier to get them to get into your own interests rather than their own. That wouldn't be healthy for them if it lasted forever, but it's still a fun time for parents who want to spend time with their kids.
Sara Blaffer Hrdy is a UC Davis anthropologist who inherited an orchard near campus. She writes about how you can get a lot more chores out of an 11-year-old daughter than a 15-year-old daughter because the 11 year old's instincts are too learn useful skills while the 15-year-old's are to perfect her appeal to a future boyfriend, which involves lots of lounging.
How does the AI timeline affect your thinking on more kids?
In the scenarios where people won't have jobs (but will be alive), goods well be free.
Why would you assume you have a job and sufficient money to support them in this scenario? And why do you think society would accept mass unemployment amongst young people without taking any action?
I deliberately ignore it. If there's no apocalypse, I would be sad if I lived my life less than fully because I was worried about an apocalypse. And if there is an apocalypse, I think I would still be sad if I'd lived my life less than fully. My kids seem happy to be alive and I think they would accept the deal of a higher risk of dying at a young age in exchange for being able to exist at all.
I would feel differently if I thought not having kids would very significantly help avert the apocalypse, but I don't think that's true.
My own (new dad) thinking is that: 1) there's no point worrying about true AI doom scenarios; 2) there's also not much point worrying about "normal" future outcomes (going to university, getting a job); 3) it is worth worrying about whether your kid is happy and a joy to be around now and for the next few years at least; 4) it's worth teaching your kid a flexible range of generalist skills that might come in useful in a range of scenarios; 5) more speculatively, it might be worth worrying a little bit about a bunch of mild doom/civilizational collapse scenarios that you can prepare your child for- mainly just because it's easier to teach skills that might be useful in a post-collapse scenario than predicting the skills that could be useful post-singularity.
Maybe this is common knowledge to other people, but what is the significance to Rotherham in the letting children roam image? Is it just a wealthy area or am I missing something...
Rotherham was the site of one of the major grooming gang scandals that happened in the UK. This involved local networks of primarily Pakistani origin men raping underage (predominantly white) girls. The image is from a British newspaper, from the font it looks like one of the RW tabloids. Hence the Straussian connection.
I.e., Rotherham was fairly safe for British kids until the British Establishment invited in a lot of the type of Pakistanis that the rest of Pakistan was extremely happy to see go: Mirpuris.
The idea was for a British firm to get the contract for a big dam that would flood the Mirpuris out of their valley, so Britain would import the Mirpuris to work in the mills of northern England.
What could possibly go wrong?
Besides the mills immediately shutting down? And then a bunch of other bad stuff happened ...
is your sense that the fact that mirpuris are disproportionately responsible for problems in Britain is due to their having been admitted to Britain through a non-selective process, where most other asians who migrate to the west are positively selected (school, work, etc)?
trying to get a sense for how much i should bias down my stereotype of ind/pak predisposition to antisocial behavior
My vague sense is that the big wave of Pakistanis to northern England a couple of generations ago was, if anything, negatively selected. So I wouldn't generalize from them. For example, Pakistanis in the U.S. tend to be respectable people who mostly keep a low profile.
The positive selection is for the US. Not western countries in general. For Europe it's generally neutral (rape is extremely common in Pakistan).
It was the site of a famous child sexual abuse scandal, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
Oh, I thought you meant Moorgate (I had forgotten the Rotherham thing), although the Straussian reading of that is more of a stretch because you have to bring in wordplay as well. Not that I'd put the wordplay past you.
Rotherham is not a wealthy area, far from it. It famously does not even have a Sainsbury's -- a mid-market supermarket. This image appeared in the Daily Mail years before the grooming scandal bubbled up into being one of the hot political issues of the day, I therefore assume the presence of Rotherham on it is completely co-incidental. No doubt, children did roam freely but in this particular image consider that the lake where the grandfather supposedly fished was a mine until about about 1980 when it was filled in with water.
> the lake where the grandfather supposedly fished was a mine until about about 1980 when it was filled in with water
To a casual investigation, this indeed seems to be true. It's wild that I've never encountered this criticism of the map image before, considering how much it circulates. I don't feel like it ultimately casts a ton of doubt on the story, even though I do agree with you that the map is most likely wrong.
I investigated bodies of water in the area; some other promising candidates also turned out to be quite recently manmade, but there's a small lake in Greasbrough (about the same distance, but in a totally different direction) which seems to have existed much longer: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fuPQWimSNQXpFr4E6
Google calls the body of water "Mill Dam"; some online sources suggest that "dam" used to refer to the body of water rather than the mechanism holding the water in, although I didn't check. It's hard to find information about it online under that name, perhaps because it's pretty small. The dam (modern sense) on it is called "Greasbrough Dam" in Google maps, and that gets more results. E.g. https://www.francisfrith.com/greasbrough/greasborough-dam_memory-453661 attests to fishing there (and to the reservoir having been present before the 1980s.)
None of this is terribly strong, but I think it's a pretty credible (and not at all extraordinary) claim, that some fishable body of water (especially to an 8-year-old child's standard of fishable) existed, around 6 miles from that spot, in 1919. In retrospect, it does seem like pretty bad factchecking, that the creator of the image believed they could definitively identify the lake where a child went fishing in 1919, from an interview in 2007.) But I bet the person who was interviewed for the story remembered being told it was that one, and didn't even realize that it had been altered by the intergenerational game of telephone.
(NB: in checking when the article was originally published, I learned or was reminded that it was originally in the Daily Mail. That does somewhat reduce the credence I give it.... On the other hand, the article seems like mostly an illustrative anecdote, anyway, and we should primarily look to actual studies instead, which we do have. See e.g. this report from the 1990s, based on studies from thr 1990s vs 1970s. https://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/one%20false%20move.pdf . Which I got from this 2012 article, which copies the map from the 2007 article: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/01/162079442/do-you-know-where-your-children-are-is-that-always-a-good-thing )
It’s pretty far away from where the great grandparent lived, and it’s not easy to walk there now. Sheffield has been industrial for a long time but the outskirts were previously much more rural.
Rotherham is a downscale working class city in Northern England. The abused girls tended to be from the most chaotic classes at the bottom of society.
My theory why kids were safer back in ye olden days is because other people were actually outside. Teenagers riding their bikes or older kids who'd be sure to repress younger kids getting too rude. Or old people sitting on the porch, keeping an eye on everyone. The kids aren't the only ones caught by the superstimulus and that's part of the problem.
Exactly. After supper EVERYONE in the neighborhood went outside. Without AC the home had built up too much heat by supper time.
Yes I think this is an important point.
I remember hearing an anecdote told by someone growing up in the 1960s and the idea that adults had a patch where they had a kind of community responsibility for any kids in that area. That might mean giving them an earful (or more physical discipline) if they were misbehaving but it also meant keeping a basic eye on their safety.
I think this is probably not the explanation. I grew up in the burbs in the late '70s and '80s. I spent my childhood walking to friends' houses, biking around, "be home by dinner", etc.
People were not outside in the burbs in '70s and '80s They weren't sitting on porches, possibly because they didn't have porches. Burbs are not old-timey small town America. They are places people live because they mostly don't want to see their neighbors.
We were safe back then because...the world is pretty safe if you live in a decent area in a developed country? This seems like something that doesn't need explanation.
That's fair, it probably gets romanticized. I just feel like one of the major problems is that people have an alternative to going out and spending time with other people, so they choose not to.
I have to agree with this based on my experience growing up in a small town in mid-2000s Europe. There were people out and about, but the architecture didn't allow for old men on porches – and even if it had, roaming meant we spent our time in the woods, or in junk yards or on funky plots of land between train tracks. The reason we chose those places was exactly because there was no supervision, so we could listen to bad music, drink energy drinks, and build "bases" out of scrap.
The same principle applied to banned media. High-speed split-screen shooter games were very much a thing back then. Even if most of our parents banned them, there was always that one kid who had the game, so that's where we went. I think something similar would happen if parents now started banning tiktok and other reels en masse.
This comment gets at another thing I didn't mention -- we had video games back then. I had an Apple II and an Atari 2600 and later a Nintendo 64. Sure, the games weren't as good as they are now, but we liked them! (Also, have you played Animal Crossing? It is not good.)
I am absolutely not discounting the role that technology plays in the current state of childhood, but I think the effects of technology are so obvious that they tend to obscure the cultural changes that preceded and amplified the effects of technology.
My daughter doesn't have a phone. She doesn't have social media accounts. She doesn't watch Youtube. And regardless her childhood looks absolutely nothing like mine -- it has changed radically, and for the worse.
I was born in 1958 in a classic nice middle to upper middle class suburb in the San Fernando Valley (e.g., think "The Brady Bunch"). We got air conditioning about 1971. We almost never sat on the front porch, but often sat out under the lanai in the back yard.
From about age 8 or 9, I frequently rode my bike to the park about 3 blocks away. At age 12, I got a ten-speed and started riding to eighth grade, about 1.5 miles away. There was a big distinction between riding on small streets, which were safe for 9 year olds, and riding on big streets where people drove 45 mph, which were scary for 12 year olds.
When I started high school at age 13 in 1972, I resolved to ride my bike to school everyday, but I got hit by a car after a couple of months.
I think in general that people were less safety-conscious back then. I don't see many adolescents riding bikes on the major thoroughfares these days. (Note that I'm talking about Los Angeles, which appears to remain a notably cyclist-hostile town.)
But kids were *not* safer back in ye olden days. The world is much safer today in all sorts of ways.
But they weren't safer. He talks about this in the post. By nearly every metric children are safer now.
You might be right about the perception of safety. But that's not the reality of safety.
100 and more years ago probably nearly every largish family had at least one child death from infection. In that context worrying too much about much rarer accidental deaths while the kids were enjoying themselves didn't make sense.
When I was a kid, we wandered around in the swamp with no one else in sight.
Now part of the problem is the porches don’t exist either. We’ve designed social life out of our cities. (Our company helps developers and cities put it back).
Back in the 80’s in my suburb, people were inside watching crappy TV instead of looking at crappy social media like they do today.
Were kids actually safer? People thinking it was safer != it was safer.
"…actually, I guess I became an anti-woke influencer (surely every good liberal mother’s worst nightmare). And I did sort of join a doomsday cult (comparatively tame but still unfortunate). Is that bad enough that my parents were right? If my kids end up as weird compared to me as I am compared to my parents, will I tolerate them as graciously as my parents still somehow tolerate me?"
A dichotomy: is being an anti-woke influencer and member of robot doomsday cult good or bad?
If it's bad, you should stop doing it and figure out what mistake led you there and whether that mistake is likely enough to also be a danger to your children. Sure, right now you kinda blame it on video games and LiveJournal, but that seems superficial and you should probably think more deeply about it.
But that's kind of irrelevant because presumably you think it's good as otherwise you would've stopped. ...
... (Or well, it kinda seems like you've gotten ambivalent about the anti-woke influencer lately, and I'd argue the doomsday cult is also wrong, as it's founded on anti-vitalism.) ...
... So if it's good, it seems more natural to teach your children about it. Like teach them about elevatorgate and the time you got cancelled in college and so on. Admittedly they are way too young to understand for now, so probably there's some open questions about feasibility here.
... And I suspect most likely the idea of teaching them this will leave an uncomfortable feeling about indoctrination? Which presumably means you're sensing the story is incomplete or that you can't fairly present it, but then that seems like reason to do more personal processing until you've got a fair and accurate view of your history.
It's bad by his parents' standards, fine by his. So if his children embrace some intellectual fad, that will be bad by his & his wife's standards, even if it's fine by his kids'.
Surely one needs to consider the fads distinctly, rather than just going by the blind assumption that whatever oneself is involved in is good and whatever others are involved in is bad.
You could evaluate in terms of Darwinian fitness: anything less likely to produce grandchildren really is bad.
Explain how humanity is better than pelagibacter communis.
Humanity is good by our standards, if not that of pelagibacter communis.
*humans* are good by my standards; I only want humanity to succeed if it's not at the expense of the humans who constitute it; obviously there's a lot of room here to satisfy both, but I can easily imagine things that are great in terms of Darwinism fitness that would be (to me) absolutely horrifying, and effectively no different than imagining an infinitely expanding bacterial colony
But you suggested the standard of Darwinian fitness, where pelagibacter communis seems to outperform humanity.
You have twins so you're starting on hard mode. Going off recollections of being a child myself, I think the "easy parenting" model breaks down as follows.
Okay, before I start, obligatory disclaimer: I think Caplan is full of crap so I immediately discount his "easy parenting" message. That out of the way:
(1) Parenting is not exactly easy, but it gets easier as you get older, have more kids, and have more experience
(2) Having the first child is the toughest, because the parents are new to it all and have no idea what to do and rely on all kinds of advice and are terrified of doing something wrong and the child dies.
(3) As the older kids get older, they need less immediate/constant parental attention and can help take care of the younger kids. My sister and I did an awful lot of "keep our youngest sibling distracted while mother got on with the rest of the household tasks".
(4) Re: "[One year olds] can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they?", if there are no older siblings to keep an eye on them, playpens. You stick the kid in the cage with some toys so you know they can't get out and into trouble (until they're old enough/big enough to climb out) and you get on with what you need to do, keeping an occasional eye on them to check they're still alive.
(5) In the past, there did tend to be grandparents living nearby if not in the same house, older married siblings who could help out with advice and time, and every body in the neighbourhood treated childrearing as a communal activity. I hated the Hillary Clinton thing of "it takes a village" but it's not completely wrong. The kids are old enough to be out of the house playing outside, if they misbehave it's fine (and indeed expected) that a random adult will tell them off and even discipline them. They roam around in gangs and end up in whatever adult's house for a meal. If little Johnny ends up cycling off to the quarry in the woods, nobody blinks an eye, and some adult will generally be around to tell little Johnny "hey, this quarry is too dangerous, turn around". Or if not, well if little Johnny cuts his knees or even fractures a bone, that's all part of growing up.
A lot of the child advice books talk about how every first parent worries they're doing it wrong and will mess up and their child will die, but neither my wife nor I ever got that. I think it's a combination of me having a very stable childhood (ie my parents were so good that they made it look easy) and my wife having four younger brothers (including some ~20 years younger) such that she was always around kids and learned everything early.
The latter definitely helps if you have experience from younger siblings or seeing younger relatives. A lot of modern parents have only one or no sibling, or weren't around younger cousins at an age to learn.
There is so much emphasis on both environmental hygiene (which is necessary, but not every surface in the house needs to be operating theatre levels of sterilised) and "if you don't get it exactly right at this crucial formative age you will warp their fragile little minds forever (and then they will grow up to join subreddits about 'raised by narcissists')" that I don't blame new parents for being neurotic.
As a parent if older children:
Your environment matter a lot.
You can't send your kids to play outside if there are no other kids to play with.
We wanted to send our daughter to school with a bus (regular bus). It was OK only because she had other friends doing the same.
Do you have kid activities within walking distance? No? then you have to drive them, and then stay there and wait for them.
Do you gave other parents to share driving with? Someone to take your kid from school if you hit traffic on the way home?
Then you can save yourself a lot of time. It is much easier if the environment supports you.
That's definitely it. If there are older siblings, or if there are a bunch of kids walking/cycling home, you can let them go. My parents let us walk home from school (about fifteen minutes) but that was on footpaths meant for pedestrians, not on a road meant for vehicular traffic.
And now that everyone is used to picking up their children themselves (I do see parents walking home with kids, not all in cars) and/or the kids would be on their own, it's precisely what you say: pick up and drop off by car because it's not (deemed) safe otherwise.
Scott can confirm your advice while also testing theories on birth order effects.
My female cousins with two kids each live at opposite ends of giant Los Angeles County, so my aunt, who lived in the middle of L.A. County, probably drove 50,000 miles per year from age 70 to 80 to look after her four grandchildren.
Looking after <2 year olds is massively time-consuming and exhausting, and pretty much always has been. Even hundreds of years ago, women (at least the overwhelming majority who couldn't afford childcare) were more or less constantly suffering the stress of (secondary, since they had work to do) childcare of their youngest. From somewhere around age 3, the minimum supervision requirement drops dramatically: modern parents just don't take advantage of this. In late 19th-century rural England, for example, it was perfectly normal for mothers to kick 3-year-olds out of the door first thing in the morning in mid-winter with a hot potato in hand and tell them not to come back until the evening.
Thank you. This is the main thing I was reading SRTHMK to figure out if it was true, I didn't get a good sense of it from the book, and you've addressed it directly. If you don't mind me asking, what convinced you of this?
As a dad of twins, I can confirm that reaching age 3 then 4 then 5 led to massive shifts in our routines and a big drop in required care (but be careful, that's when #3 comes along). Being able to get dressed, feed themselves, and get in their own carseat are some fantastic milestones.
Definitely agree. I have a two year old and a four year old that like to play outside a lot this time of year. I can trust that the 4 yo isn't going to run into the road but I have to chase the 2 yo around to make sure he doesn't.
Partly reading (the kicking-3-year-olds out the door thing comes from Larks Rise to Candleford, an amazing book if you're interested in that period of history) history books- textbooks, popular history, and actual books-written-a-long-time-ago.
That and the fact that I have a 2.5 and 4-year old, and I can see that it is possible to leave my 4-year old to her own devices for long periods without substantial danger (we don't actually leave her alone for very long periods). It's actually in many ways *easier* to look after a 2 and 4 year old together than a 2-year old alone. They play together, and the 4-year old will alert me to any issues.
Yes, the whole child freedom / parenting intensity thing is, from my perspective, for older children. Infants gonna infant, it's intense, one deals with it. It gets more intense but more joyful in toddler hood, and then easier after that (I'm told!)
Even with my 3.5 year old, she's still pretty volatile, but being potty trained, dressing herself in the morning, etc makes a huge difference.
Yeah I've actually got to the point where my 4yo is easier than my 6yo, because my 4yo just wants to play but my 6yo wants to talk all the time.
I used to think that the "why?" phase would be fun, I'd finally get a chance to teach my kids all about the world. But instead it turns out that 90% of the "why" questions are just dumb. "It's Tuesday" "Why is it not Monday?" "Because yesterday was Monday" "But what if it's Monday today?" "It's not, it's Tuesday" "But what if it was?"
A good source for historical and anthropological info is
https://open.substack.com/pub/petergray?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=76x4s
and for this concern specifically, his recent piece "The Age Four Transition to Responsible Childhood"
https://petergray.substack.com/p/74-the-age-four-transition-to-responsible
> the minimum supervision requirement drops dramatically: modern parents just don't take advantage of this.
Toddlers only solo play a little. The rest of the time they want their parents' engagement even if they're capable of operating with less supervision. This is true even if you have more than one in that age range. With older siblings / relatives, it's less acute.
> 19th-century rural England
Too long ago to be a useful comparison, most people worked the land so they were never that far from their kids anyway. A rural area in that time is just bush and domestic animals, not cars. Also, they had more kids - that 3 year old had older siblings.
Toddlers do want parental attention, yes. But you don't have to give it to them. They will eventually learn to play together if you largely ignore them- my children are quite capable of entertaining themselves for an hour plus. It depends a bit what you're doing. Household chores that they've seen you do hundreds of times before is best. Parental screen time is worst.
I'm not, obviously, suggesting doing that with 3-year-olds today. I just think it's interesting that this is perfectly possible in principle.
Anything is possible in principle, at a cost. Toddlers are social beings like the rest of us, but with stronger emotional needs. It's cruel and unusual to ignore them (at length) if they don't have siblings, and probably so even if they do have one.
> an hour plus
An hour plus is fuck all, you might as well have said "it's helpful to encourage some solo activity"
I'm pretty fanatically anti screen (except for flights, all rules are out the window), and yes, my kids just learned to play together.
My experience comports with this well. Particularly when your child has a similarly aged peer, as Scott's will always have. My oldest four children spend anywhere from one to five hours outside with minimal supervision most days that the weather permits. My one year old, much less so, but my oldest can provide the infant with enough supervision that my wife can be child-free for brief but meaningful periods of time.
As Dewey points out above, this effect is dulled by the fact that many parents (like my wife and I) immediately fill the free time with another child. But once you exit the period of your life when you have a child under the age of 3, the immediate demands on your time decline rapidly, if you let them.
Separately, trying to divide childcare time into primary and secondary seems fraught because of how dependent it is on the parent's temperament and preferences. If your child is playing in the garden, you can choose to sit and watch them, or get up and water the flowers. The demand the child places on you is the same, but the two cases will be classified differently.
I don't think this was addressed specifically in the post, but I speculate that the primary to secondary childcare ratio has risen over time, not just the absolute amount of time. Explicable perhaps by both changing parental attitudes and the lessened burden of homemaking and other home-based work.
> Even hundreds of years ago, women (at least the overwhelming majority who couldn't afford childcare) were more or less constantly suffering the stress of (secondary, since they had work to do) childcare of their youngest.
That work doesn't have to be done by the mother; it can also be done by older children.
Regarding screens... PBS is still a thing right? And console games? I watched an episode of Bob's Burgers with my 3 year old and he seemed to enjoy it.
I think it would be useful to discuss screens as a spectrum-- classic movies and documentaries on a TV on one end, YouTube Shorts and TikTok on a tiny phone on the other. Ipad games in the middle somewhere... at one end, it requires patience and good attention span, at the other it's just constant dopamine hits like a slot machine. Jonathan Haidt now says his biggest concern about phones is the "attention fragmentation" not the mental health.
With regard to children, I tend to be of the opinion that screens are fine, but the internet should be restricted.
Fully agree. My children have a considerable time allowed at screens, but it is the *content* which is dangerous, not the screen by itself. Go Gabbys Dollhouse, go!
Yeah, I’ve been showing my niece (nearly 3) zoo cams of pandas, elephants, etc lately. On an absolutely objective level, maybe it’s better for her formatively if I get on the ground and help her build a tower. But also, she spends loads of time with blocks and magnets, and before I showed her she had no idea that pandas were real; it certainly doesn’t feel cheap in the way that most YouTube kids (or adults’) content is.
I’d love to read a smart grand unified theory of “screen time”: what distinguishes healthy vs benign vs harmful screen time. A fleshed out version of this comment, basically, that helps me think about various screen time situations as they come up.
I think you could map each type on an X and Y graph by length and whether it's solo or cooperative/social. Playing Fortnite alone in your room would be worse than playing grand theft auto with a few friends in a basement. I would love to see that! So there would be 4 quadrants, one quadrant being the ideal, 2 quadrants being "ok" and one being "very bad"
Hmm... also need something for addictive qualities, maybe. And age of the media. My kids couldn't make it through the opening credits for Disney's The Rescuers.
I don't mind my toddlers watching Bluey or even some Pixar-type thing for a while. It's a good respite, and they frankly don't have the attention span to do it for longer than like 20 or 30 minutes before getting distracted.
I'd feel much differently about algo-slop that *could* actually keep them engaged indefinitely.
Kanopy is one of the better repositories of wholesome, education, not-super-stimulating content for young children. Their kids' content is mostly lightly-animated audiobooks of common children's books, plus some PBS-style shows. You sign up for it with your local public library card, at least if you have one and your library has a subscription. If not, then I think you're out of luck, since there doesn't seem to be a way to buy an individual subscription.
Some of the difference over time is probably because families were bigger and lived close to other families, so young kids would spend a lot of time in the "care" of older siblings, friends or neighbours' kids (and parents were presumably more accepting of the slightly increased risk of accidents).
One-year-olds are a bit young, but for say a 4yo there would be a big difference in parental investment between sending them out to play with the others vs. playing with them 1:1 and/or driving them to structured activities. The bit you quote about "Entertaining myself was my job, not hers" seems central to Caplan's ideas.
Your orange T-shirts idea seems good. Or maybe you could arrange for all the families to live in adjacent houses and combine all the backyards into a big communal play space, then you get the benefits of hands-off childcare but without needing to be confrontational with neighbours and police. I've seen housing co-ops and university accommodation (like for graduate students with families, or visiting professors) arranged on this principle and it seems to work well.
Back in the 1990s, there was a teenybopper band from Oklahoma of three brothers called Hanson. They had a big hit with "Mmmm ... Bop." Their dad was a brilliant businessman so he arranged they could soon retire rich.
They bought three big houses on one giant lot, and had six kids each. So each kid can go out in their giant communal backyard and play with his his or her favorites of his or her 17 siblings or cousins.
Sounds nice.
I suspect part of the reason people are stressed out by their kids is also because they don't know how to handle them. Nobody grows up in large close families anymore, taking care of cousins and neighbors and friends' kids. So then you're given a baby and you have to figure it out rapidly.
Your anecdote about the table though made me think about how people don't know how to get kids to do stuff anymore. It takes practice and you don't get it anymore until you're stuck in a house with your own kids!
And you read seven books and they all contradict each other and if you do the wrong thing you're a monster.
I did really like The Power of Showing Up because the message there is that you just need to try to give the kid what they need in the moment and everything else is window dressing.
"And the adult trend certainly isn’t caused by coddling. "
Depends on how one defines things like seatbelt laws, improved automobile safety, drunk driving campaigns, etc.
Adult treds aren't caused be someone in their home overseeing each action they take, true, but at least in part a directed effort to make society less dangerous. This isn't a criticism, but even as adults we increasingly want someone looking out for us.
Yeah I found this strange too: it seems pretty natural to believe that the risk aversion adults show in parenting their kids might also express itself in decisions they make for themselves!
I work from home and try to help my wife take the kids downstairs in the morning and do the first diaper change. We have two boys. A few weeks back my oldest son peed all over the backs of my legs and I had to run upstairs into my office to give a presentation and didn’t have time to clean myself up. I have to take the oldest boy to various appointments to help with his speech development. Everyone keeps getting sick so for about a month and some change we’ve been really out of sorts. My wife hurt her arm and needs a lot more help than normal and I usually have meetings all day every day back to back so it’s hard to get down to help as much as I want.
I’ve been waking up at 3am, or earlier, to do the writing that I do for substack or to work on Trust Assembly stuff. Last week when all the Trust Assembly developers met I was giving my son a bath while we were talking through phase one requirements and I just had to apologize to everyone.
I don’t think there’s a good answer here other than: decide you love your children so much that you’d die for them so inconveniences and being tired don’t matter that much, that you much prefer the world in which your son is physiologically capable of peeing on you versus the one where he’s sick or doesn’t exist, and that you’re at least healthy enough to do the work you can do while all of this is happening.
I know it’s not easy, though. But at the end of your life you get to know you did something really, really hard and that you chose it and you loved someone else so much that you dug your way through it. I am also very romantic and melodramatic, though, so your mileage may vary on how well that helps you get through the rough spots.
I think a lot of the romantic and melodramatic stuff is true, although it's difficult to live if you're focused on that 100% of the time. it's there when you need more reasons to get through the rough stuff. but it's real and it's serious and I appreciate you sharing what you did here.
The way I try to explain is that I couldn’t be a waiter because it would give me a nervous breakdown trying to make small talk and remember everyone’s orders. But I could sword fight the devil at the gates of hell because of a small change in a product development vision and not really think there’s anything extraordinary about that. I just have to figure out how to fit more things into that second category and maybe start wearing a cloak or something.
I read your recent post about your daily routine, and I wanted to say - if Jordan Peterson is right that the essence of manhood is to carry the heaviest load of responsibility that you can shoulder, then congrats on being one of the manliest men that I know.
I work from home for a Big Tech company, and my wife stays home with our two boys (a two-year-old and a three-year-old). On a typical weekday, I work seven hours and watch the boys for five hours.
As I told one of my best friends recently, there are two different types of happiness in life. Type 1 happiness is to do things that you find pleasurable. Type 2 happiness is to work on things that are valuable so that you can look back on your life with satisfaction in what you accomplished.
My life has a lot more Type 2 than Type 1 happiness right now, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to sound snobbish, which I think I did here but you just have to say to yourself, “This sucks in certain dimensions and I accept that it sucks and I’m not going to try to do anything about it because this particular kind of sucking is like vegetables and I need it.”
If it makes you feel any better, you sound like a great husband and dad.
I’m a fraud who left a dinosaur leg under the couch this very morning.
I don't care so much about average test scores going down because of phones or immigration or whatnot, I worry more about the exploding teen depression rates since circa 2008, when smartphones became a thing and social media really took off. You can tutor away the risk of bad test scores, so long as you have the money. But how strongly can you, as a parent, monitor your pre-teens' usage of social media? Can you tell your teen's Reels/Tiktok algorithm to please avoid showing them thirst traps, car crashes, terror attacks and unhinged political takes? By the age of 13, I had already seen (almost) everything weird and awful the internet had to show. I knew about bestgore, theync and efukt, all because of online forums where people shared weird/creepy finds for fun. All the while creating a sense of self in a worldview dominated by social media of all kinds. Test scores are one thing, but the damage open access to the internet can do to a young mind goes well beyond school work.
People need to buy their teens dumbphones without apps. That's the solution. The phones exist. They can still be in touch with everyone and you can track your kids as much as you want.
As a parent of teens (and as a parent who really hates the impact of smart phones), the practical issue is flirting/dating. 80% (or more) happens via one or two apps and not participating really leaves kids in the lurch.
Maybe they can do that once they can afford to buy smartphones for themselves.
For sure, my kids bought their own phones.
What happened to good ol' SMS dick pics? Kids these days.
Not letting your kids flirt/date seems like an added bonus, right?
I'm surprised the psych professions haven't come down harder on the risks of social media. Instead, we hear mostly about 'screens' as though binge watching Wild Kratts is somehow similar to Instagram. There are meta-analyses of studies about the correlation between Instagram use and depression, including teens normalizing self harm. Power Rangers, not so much.
[Caveat: more contentious than religion and politics combined is the subject of parenting. My kids/home are different from yours, so of course YMMV.]
My bias is that while they need to learn how to be digital natives, sure, they're not well served by social media as kids or teens. We focus on how to use GPS to explore and discover farther into the community, without fear of getting lost. "Take a trash bag and clean up this shopping center for an hour of service. Take your brother. Call me if you get lost." But when should we introduce Facebook? Speaking from personal experience, I'm not sure it's good at any age - including my own! If personal experience suggests it's bad for me, why would I feed it to my kids? Especially given the ever increasing mountain of research suggesting it could seriously mess them up.
"But they're going to use it eventually! You're just delaying the inevitable." Maybe. But I wouldn't take that same approach with tobacco, alcohol, or sex. I hope they have sex eventually, but that doesn't mean I'm eager for them to get experience with it early on.
I hope they never take up smoking for a variety of reasons (YMMV), but even if they do, I hope it's sparingly, and not out of habit. Certainly, I teach them of the addictive potential of tobacco, as well as the major health implications of using it. I don't see why Instagram shouldn't have the same warnings from me as a parent: "A large percentage of teens and young adults report increased depression, lower self image, and higher stress from using Instagram. I'm not giving you access now, because I'm the parent who decides these things now. If you choose to do that when you're an adult, know what you're getting yourself into."
If they ever start allowing babies into their own Instagram accounts, I suggest Scott strongly reconsider signing up the twins.
screen time - independent of the teenage depression / social media use correlation - may be harmful per se; i have no idea. the best excuse i've heard for parents allowing young kids social media to experience stressors is that the kids will if deprived be more isolated from peers and more vulnerable later in life to social media harms from any enforced naivete. my (3 under 10 yo) kids play roblox and minecraft and i should probably figure this social media benefit/harm stuff out.
This hypothesis (that early exposure for an otherwise harmful stressor can reduce harm) seems tenuous to me. Is there any support for it for social media, or is it pure conjecture? I'd like to see some good evidence for it before I rely on it.
In any other situation (e.g. porn, cigarette smoking, sex, gambling) my prior world be that early exposure would have the opposite effect, predisposing them to harm or addictive behaviors before they're mature enough to make nuanced and careful decisions in a complex environment. I admit this is also pure conjecture, not evidence-based, but it feels like one of those Chesterton's fences with a bull in the pasture beyond.
Also, it's not clear to me how much social media enhances vs. replaces social interaction. If the former, great. If the latter, it's a net harm all around. I'm sure there's a little of both going on, but if my kids are anything like I am (they are), the balance will not naturally tilt toward enhancement of social interactions.
> we hear mostly about 'screens'
Yeah, the important thing is not "more screen vs less screen" but what exactly are you using the screen for. Vector graphics editors are better than Facebook. Khan Academy is better than YouTube suggestions. Legend of Kyrandia is better than begging for more money to spend on Roblox.
We should teach the kids to use the screens responsibly. And we better do it before they start getting lessons from their classmates.
My fear is that the real lessons are by example, which puts the onus on me to have healthy technology habits.
I'll post this link twice in these comments... There is a strong case that the depression is caused by the coddling (no independent play, constant risk aversion, adult decisions for everything) more than the phones. Peter Gray at Play Makes Us Human lays it all out:
https://open.substack.com/pub/petergray?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=76x4s
A good reason to doubt that the teen depression rate is real is that suicides haven't really increased in OECD. The criteria to diagnose it is much laxer and there's social contagion through tiktok. No one would get diagnosed with depression because their dog died 40 years (causal life events were excluded in the first place) ago but it's a very likely scenario today.
> Only 10% of variability in alcohol addiction is shared environmental (eg potentially due to parenting); should this also be our estimate for phone addiction?
Whenever I see these studies I’m not sure it’s evidence of anything. Isn’t this just the mean variability that a study found? I.E. If you have your heart dead set on making sure your kid is not an alcohol, or a phone addict, and you put in significantly more time and effort than the average family (which is usually nothing), you’d be able to significantly over-perform this metric.
Genetics can predict quite accurately how much weight you can bench, but deliberate effort can blow that number out of the water.
You're sort of right, but I also think of the studies as sort of estimating the elasticity of outcome with respect to intervention.
That is, you have some idea how hard other parents try to keep their kids from alcoholism. Let's call that X effort. If the studies show that X effort produces minimal results, then it seems like most techniques barely work at all, and you need to either be much smarter than other people (use different, better techniques) or believe that you can put in an absolutely crazy amount of effort (plus have faith that the crazy amount of effort will work).
It also suggests that there's a strong genetic component, which naturally makes it less likely that any given effort will work.
I guess it depends on what the prior is on how much effort the average parent puts in. My guess would be almost none, so even moderate effort, or very intentional minimal effort, might have a very large effect.
I’ve seen parents to keep their kids from underage drinking, but I’m not sure how many parents will even discuss alcoholism (unless there’s an alcoholic in the family, at which point any deliberate effort is conditional on being in an environment where people drink a lot, and likely having a genetic disposition for alcoholism).
It’s like, how much exercise does it take to be healthier than the average American, within the range of health outcomes that can be changed with lifestyle? My intuition is almost none, since if you exercise for even a few minutes per day you’re easily in the top 50%.
I think I would say something like - most people don't put in much deliberate anti-alcohol effort. But a lot of the things you would do are things like loving your kid more, or making them better educated, or being strict disciplinarians, which there *is* a lot of natural variance in. So you would have to explain why whatever you're going to do isn't picked up by that natural variance.
I don't really think too much about alcoholism, but as for screen time, I think there's some plausible interventions that take additional effort (maybe better phrased as not taking less effort) which 95% of parents aren't doing. Homeschooling would be a good start, and I think you could plausibly limit all exposure to social media or any short form content until a kid is a teenager, so long as they aren't in a peer group that is using social media.
I look at the persistence of cultural groups across centuries, and I get the feeling that the concept of teenagers rebelling against the values of their parents isn't really a necessary thing. Maybe the forming of coherent values that a child self-enforces is really, really difficult, but there's some major world religions that forbid alcohol consumption, relatively successfully, and I don't think that's because they're less genetically disposed for it. If successful cultural memes can cause major differences between cultures in the metrics we care about, I would be very surprised if deliberately cultivated cultural memes and life experiences in children couldn't have that same effect.
At least for things that are plausibly within an individuals abilities of self-control to change, like how much social media we use, or how much alcohol we drink.
I still buy Caplan's argument though. I think a huge amount of the resources put into kids are either pointless (as in they don't make children much if any happier in the meantime, and don't influence their life outcomes at all), or are only useful so far as they allow people to successfully play status games and get the best signals of success.
If you convert to Mormonism and move to an all Mormon dry town in remotest Utah, you can probably significantly reduce your child's chance of becoming an alcoholic, at least before age 40.
Exactly. This is the major reason why it casually attributing 90% of a child's likelihood of becoming an alcoholic to chance and genetics seems wrong to me.
You probably don't have to go that far to have an appreciable effect either. Spending some time to cultivate a healthy understanding and attitude about alcohol is probably a good start.
For example, we've socially constructed a lower smoking rate over the last 60 years. Teen pregnancy is way down.
Lots of things can change even when genes don't.
I think a lot of that "genetics matters, parenting doesn't" relies on the assumption that in general people will be responsible parents.
Sure, whether your kid ends up an alcoholic may depend heavily on genetics, but nobody takes that as a reason for "well my kid doesn't have alcoholism genes, so it's okay for me to crack open a beer for my six year old to drink with me" and have the kid drinking a six pack himself by the age of ten.
In all fairness, for people who think about these things, being a minimally responsible parent is pretty much a given.
I worry though that this sort of thinking will cause parents to allow addictive behavior when they’re young and impressionable on the assumption that preventing it when they’re young won’t actually work. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large portion of tobacco addiction could be attributed to genetics, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if 90+% of people who started smoking before the age of ten kept the habit for their entire life.
>but I also wouldn’t be surprised if 90+% of people who started smoking before the age of ten kept the habit for their entire life.
The number in
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4519837/
is high, though not quite that high
>The rate of adult dependence is highest for individuals who experienced onset of regular use in middle childhood to early adolescence, with peak risk of adult dependence (43%) corresponding to regular smoking onset at approximately 10 years old.
Interesting how the dependence ratio is significantly higher for females. The study Scott linked also found a significantly higher % shared environmental factor for females than it did for males.
Maybe environment plays a larger role in female development than male development?
Many Thanks! Could be. I was mostly just looking at the 0-th order result that an early start to smoking is indeed really bad news.
Interestingly Caplan himself muses on this question in a blog post a couple years ago called "Do Ten Times as Much":
> Take parenting. Most readers summarize my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids as “Parenting doesn’t matter.” But that is only one possible interpretation of the twin and adoption data. The data is also consistent, however, with the theory that most parents are barely trying to get results — at least on many relevant margins. I pondered this in depth before I started homeschooling my kids. I’m always stunned by all the economists who fail to teach their kids about supply-and-demand. All my kids know about these holy diagrams. What’s the difference between their kids and mine? I did ten times as much.
Twins is harder! I have a 5yo, a 3yo, and a 1yo.
At one, I could absolutely do secondary childcare by cooking etc while my baby toddled around, stacked blocks, etc. With my almost 1yo, I could have a grown up conversation with an adult while he dragged bike helmets across the floor.
We baby proof an entire floor, so we don’t need to have eyes on the baby at all times.
With siblings, it’s more complicated, but our two big girls frequently parallel play or play with each other without parental involvement.
No screens for us. Happy to answer questions!
I should add that when I was pregnant I paid a lot of attention to how my friends with three or more kids parenting so I could mirror it with my *first* kid.
I’m further away than many parents on the playground, I let kids take a crack at solving problems themselves (and live with eg their shoes being on the wrong feet), we bathe them less!
What else did you learn. And how much is less, like every second day?
I conjecture that how easy or hard parenting is depends a *ton* on how quickly you're inclined to accrue stress during "secondary childcare"; and this depends a whole lot on your particular brain, not just on the age and personality of the kids. I mostly can't cook while other *adults* are around being polite and fairly quiet, let alone while toddlers are dragging helmets across the floor. I knew I was a big old "nope" for having a kid as long as I'd need to do significant amounts of "living my life in earshot of kids". I bet that if you can comfortably read dense nonfiction while two people hold a conversation right next to you, this predicts that you'll roll well relatively with the attentional challenges of secondary childcare! I am the opposite of that (which fortunately I knew going in).
Yes, one thing that helps me is that I am culturally very New York Jewish and v comfortable with overlapping conversations
Our Belief networks - both facts and values - encode strategies for navigating life. As technology accelerates, the impact of different value structures is going to lead to more divergent outcomes, because technology makes it easier to get what you want. So I think we will see in the coming decade increases talk about questions that the 20th century considered “obsolete” - questions like, “what does good mean”? - because it will be come clear that everything we do and think is value laden, and that most value systems leave you under the control of a machine that has mapped out your limbic system more accurately than you have.
The classical answer to the “put down the phone” question is, “your kids need to cultivate the virtue of obedience.” This is what I tell my kids: if you don’t learn how to obey someone that loves you, you’re going to obey the dictate of a machine that sees you as food. Of course, this depends ultimately on me telling them, that I also have to obey a source that loves me and knows more than me.
I believe the return of cultural Christianity is going to largely be a function of people understanding that the only alternative to being a slave to your emotional responses (as poked by a machine) is to choose to obey a conscience trained on the concept that there’s one good thing, which is also the root of causality.
The Amish & ultra-Orthodox "strategies" seem to be outcompeting everyone else in the US.
They don't have a say in development of either culture or technology. Of course, if civilization collapses soon, they'll be better positioned to survive than most, but otherwise their strategies don't seem particularly interesting.
The ultra-Orthodox do seem to be culturally influential in Israel:
https://nonzionism.com/p/why-is-israel-fertile
Wow, great post, you've succinctly organized in a few phrases something I've been thinking for a while.
My less sophisticated way of putting it is "how can you tell your kid something is wrong, without having a fixed basis for what wrong or right even is?". Or "on what authority can you tell your child that something is wrong".
A few years back I started hearing parents (and teachers) saying "that's not okay" when a child did something bad. Is that because in our current age of moral relativity we can no long define "bad"?
That being said, I'm just not sure what a conversation with my kid where I say "if you don’t learn how to obey someone that loves you, you’re going to obey the dictate of a machine that sees you as food" would look like, ha ha...
My obligatory urbanist take: it is taken pretty much as given in the r/fuckcars, orange-pilled and so on circles that one massive reason that kids don't have as much freedom these days (in some places) is cars. When I was a kid I walked to school; try doing this in North American suburbia. Where I live primary-school age kids bike everywhere — that is not feasible in car dependent places. Although I do agree with you that a large part of it is cultural: there are literally jurisdictions where "children" under the age of 16 (sixteen!) cannot be outside without adult supervision, and that includes on the street in front of their house. Insanity. I went everywhere on my own by the time I was twelve, and I'm younger than you are.
I don't think this is a meaningful part of it. In the car-centric suburbs I've lived in, you usually have a division into "neighborhoods" of ~500 houses each, with one park / pool / school in each. Within each neighborhood, there are only very small side streets that kids older than three can easily cross or even play in, and the main streets are only between neighborhoods and other neighborhoods, or between neighborhoods and commercial areas. So it seems like we should be able to let kids roam within a neighborhood, go to the local park/pool/school and the houses of any friends within your nearest 500 neighbors. But in practice I don't see parents doing this much.
I've always been confused by the car argument because the suburbs seems pretty idyllic for this, much better than having your kid live in SF and the nearest park being down Market Street or across the Tenderloin or something.
That assumes that faster, busier roads are more risky. obviously they are if you blindly wander into the road. But beyond toddler age they don't do that, so risk homeostasis comes into play: A kid will be wary of a fast, busy road, but might dash after a football into a road they 'know' is safe. I've seen some statistics to this effect (which were actually on cats not kids - the Bristol Cat Study - but possibly the effect applies the same) .
I actually do think that a lot of the range reduction is due to cars. This coincides with my lived experience - when I was a kid (in the 80s) I was allowed around the block at a young age. A kid was hit by a car (unavoidably, by the driver), on my street (which was a quiet street) and (from what I remember,looking back) all the local mothers became more risk-averse.
Edited to add: However we also still let cats roam, in the UK. That might make a good control, except that I'm not sure anyone was keeping cat road accident statistics more than a few years back.
I think cars have been common for much longer than the 80s. You being around the block at that age indicates differences in standards that can't be chalked up to cars.
I grew up in a suburb in England in the 70s/80s. If you look at a photo of a street from that time, there are a handful of cars parked on the side of the road. There was maybe one car every ten minutes driving slowly by. If you look at a photo of the same street now, it's jam-packed with parked cars and non-stop cars going down the middle.
So yes, there were cars back then, but they didn't interrupt our playing in the street at all.
Maybe things were different in England. The US has more of a car culture.
I agree I wouldn't want my kid literally playing in the street even if it was 99% safe, but I still don't see why this would prevent an eight year old from going to the local park.
Fair enough. Eight sounds a bit young to me, but I'm hardly an expert on eight-year-olds. I guess if you were taking them yourself before then, you'd have a good idea if they were too distractable to get there safely on their own.
Not sure about that. For context, I'm European, always lived in walkable/bikeable places. But I've been to North American suburbia, and from what I've seen it's a very human-hostile place. Very little space for walking (often to the point of literally not having sidewalks), no biking infrastructure (sharrows at best), highway-width car lanes encouraging speeding...
I can't reply to the Tenderloin or Market Street example (since I have no idea what those are), but cities are way more kid friendly than North American suburbia as far as I can tell. I mean, I grew up in a city. You just walk/cycle/take public transport everywhere. It's safe and easy. I live in a city now, and kids just... get around. There's green spaces within fifteen minutes of your home. From what I remember of North American suburbs it's mostly just this profound feeling of dissociation. You're just walking past these endless, identical houses, with massive front lawns with nobody using them, and there's no sidewalk, and when you finally reach your destination it's this massive car park that's totally out of any kind of relatable scale, and so on and so forth. It's just not a place to exist if you're not in a car (granted, my experience is limited to a small sample size. But my conversations with Americans reinforce this. I can't count how many times I've heard them tell me how they experienced cultural shock because of how walking/cycling friendly the streets here are).
Edit: I don't want this to be like an "America Bad vs. America Good kinda thing. There's plenty of Western Europeans who enjob bashing America unfarily, and I disagree with them. I like plenty of things about America. I'm just making a point about this one specific issue.
Some parts of America are as you describe, but much of it isn't. Sidewalks are quite common, as are nearby parks, large front yards with enough space to play, and streets with very little traffic. I'm quite critical of this land use pattern, but I don't think it's fair to characterize it as hostile to playing children.
Below are a few Google Street View images that I think typify American suburbs. I picked them more or less at random.
Certainly, a three-year-old cannot be trusted to sit down in the middle of a road in these places, but an eight or ten-year-old could. I don't think this is overall a good thing, but in many of such places, the streets are laid out in an intentionally winding and directionless way to discourage through traffic. There's almost no reason to drive on these streets unless you're going to one of these houses. Such drivers are both rare and generally not going
1. Chicago, IL https://www.google.com/maps/@42.1921567,-88.4145344,3a,75y,358.15h,77.22t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sykOrpFtdnCw0e314rcas3g!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D12.780000000000001%26panoid%3DykOrpFtdnCw0e314rcas3g%26yaw%3D358.15!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDUxMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
2. Phoenix, AZ https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4311096,-111.8340626,3a,75y,87h,72.18t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sHk2G6OQ2mn13YgTh86-2RA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D17.823993900234%26panoid%3DHk2G6OQ2mn13YgTh86-2RA%26yaw%3D87.00223385299057!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDUxMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
3. Fort Collins, CO https://www.google.com/maps/@40.573568,-105.1275544,3a,75y,277.71h,69.29t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1swXKMWKPYy2UKhPIAMHBqPQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D20.711998708682373%26panoid%3DwXKMWKPYy2UKhPIAMHBqPQ%26yaw%3D277.7059618611774!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDUxMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
4. Hartford, CT
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7915844,-72.7401652,3a,75y,270.65h,72.48t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sXB06eB9Zonom33422Ccsqg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D17.517179325570282%26panoid%3DXB06eB9Zonom33422Ccsqg%26yaw%3D270.64678986363555!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDUxMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Chicago has wonderfully wide sidewalks and bright streetlights.
Right, I went to the library by myself 2 blocks away and the park 4 blocks away all the time as a small child.
But keep in mind that this was during the Charles Manson Era. I was 10 when Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Gang about 6 miles away.
Charles Manson had a sizable impact on American culture, all for the bad.
I raised my first child in a suburb, am raising the second in the middle of Chicago. The specific mixes of free-range risks seem _different_ in those two environments but not particularly higher/lower. And I don't detect any meaningful difference in parental decisionmaking on this point between the two.
Also, curious about jurisdictions having that law up to age 16. I am familiar with it up to ages 12 or so but not higher. [I know of curfew laws having higher cutoffs, including in Chicago, but of course that's not nearly the same thing and not at all a new thing.]
Where specifically is adult supervision required for any child to be outside up through age 15?
I don't understand this, I live in a totally car-dependent area, and kids all walk and bike to school here and are outside on their own all the time. Do you not have sidewalks? Speed limit is 25 in most residential suburban neighborhoods and they have speedbumps and stop-signs, etc. No real difference in level of cars over the past 40 years.
Growing up my the elementary school was only 1.5 miles away, but there were no sidewalks, and there was a school bus. Same with middle school- no sidewalks! High school was in another town, and not walkable. It's still the same today.
I went to school from K-12 in 1964-1976 in Sherman Oaks, CA, home to the then-busiest freeway interchange in the world (405 San Diego Freeway -101 Ventura Freeway).
I rode my bike more then than kids do now, but I also got hit by a car at age 13. My guess is that people are more safety-conscious now than then, just as fewer people have trampolines in their yards than they did then.
Is today's safety consciousness more unreasonable? No.
But does it come with side effects? Yes.
Oddly, it's the other way round here - I'm seeing a lot more trampolines in yards now because those were never A Thing as I was growing up. Though they are the more child-safe ones with netting in case the kids bounce off.
OK, yes, that makes sense, there have been big improvements in trampoline safety.
The Twitter account Super 70s Sports runs a lot of photos from 40-80 years ago of kids playing on public playground equipment that looks absolutely lethal to 21st Century eyes.
Oh gosh, when I think back to the playground when we were kids in the 70s, yeah it would *not* be permitted today.
It was a fairly new one at the start, but wasn't really maintained so apart from the things like "if you fall off the swings you will hit your face on tarmacadam", when the chains on the swings broke they weren't replaced, so half the swings were lopsided and ready to break loose at the height of your arc. All you say brings back the memories... the sharp edges on the slide, the lack of anything to prevent kids flying off the end and splitting their skulls open, the rusting equipment, the risky behaviour of older kids on the 'swing boat' type equipment which of course they tried to make go as high as possible - all the Good Old Days when this is what you got your tetanus shots for, after all! 😀
My brother and I actually played with lawn darts when we were kids. Quite frequently, and uneventfully.
For the analytically inclined, parenting is constantly adjusting to each new stage of child development. The problem is that the stages are fluid and just when you think you're in a new stage, it's changed again. The results is that each day is another adjustment. So, why parent at all and not just outsource it (to babysitters and nannies)? Usually, it's because we love our children. We don't do it for their long-term success or expected outcomes (although that's a great side benefit when it occurs), but because we hope to impart our values, which we typically believe are worth living by, and thus also worth passing on. No wonder that so many offspring occupations are reasonably close to their parents' (we are what we repeatedly do... or are exposed to).
So, you can embrace the constant deluge of parenting change as simply a part of parenting and a consequence of reproduction - seeing their small stages of development as stages to adjust your approach to parenting, or you can adopt the less-analytical approach that parenting is best performed as employing general principles that function no matter the stage - kindness, love, compassion, respect, guidance, community, support, etc.
We allowed our 7 year old girl to walk around the neighborhood alone (for example to visit her grandparents, who were a 15 minute walk away). Unfortunately there were no other kids her age outside alone so it didn’t make sense for her to be outside alone all the time. We didn’t tell her it was unique that we let her do this and she was fine. Until one time two teenage boys on bikes were laughing and pointing at her “look, it’s a little girl walking alone!” She became scared and self conscious and didn’t want to walk alone anymore.
Then we moved to an orthodox Jewish neighborhood, which means there are always lots of kids playing outside, especially on weekends (and very few cars driving on Shabbat). And now our kids are (ages 4, 7, 10) play outside all the time and it’s fine.
I think the phone problem is not just kids on phones way too early, it's parents on phones while they're with the kids. Not to say that parents can't or shouldn't be on their phones, but I've seen too much of "mother on phone ignoring child". That's going to skew normal interactions and development (mother not speaking to or interacting with child is a big way of retarding development) and will have negative effects down the line even before child phone use comes into play.
This review would benefit from reviewing the Freakonomics episode partly inspired by this book and the follow up 10 years later (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-economists-guide-to-parenting-10-years-later/). The follow up really put me off the philosophy. Caplan put more resources and effort (homeschooling them, seems like he taught them 10 hours of economics a week, and then had them stay at his office to socialize with all the professors) into his parenting than most people possibly could, not really supporting his book. Levitt says he was chronically sleep deprived and doesn't even remember what he did for parenting. His kid says he wasn't actually present as a parent and was always golfing instead (he thought that his going golfing would instill a hard work ethic into them by showing them what practice means).
I've read that transcript and I'm not sure your summary is accurate, nor do I get any doom-and-gloom. Levitt does say he was chronically sleep-deprived, but that was due as well to being a big-dog professor and writing a book, and where does he say he blacked out and remembers nothing? (He just says "I listened to the podcast episode that you did 10 years ago and I was already completely humbled by then. I think I was sleep-deprived chronically.") And he did do a lot of golfing, but where does he say this was meant to instill a hard work ethic? There's only two refs to golf and the first one is entirely humorous ("I mean, I would say if you came to our house and you had to guess what our professions were, you might think that we were fortune tellers and, I don’t know, failed professional golfers.").
Levitt says "I was a little surprised that both of my older daughters, their main memory is that I was completely absent, that I was always golfing, which is true. I did do a lot of golfing. I didn’t know they realized I was doing a lot of golfing." The part about intending it to be a life lesson is probably something I made up (it's been a couple years since I listened to it). Levitt does say he can't remember how he parented his first set of kids ("I couldn’t really remember how I parented the first time around, and it was all just a bit of a blur") but it's not clear if that's connected to the sleep deprivation.
I don't think Caplan has done poorly as a parent - I think he just hasn't done what his book recommends (I haven't read it, so maybe I'm wrong about that). Levitt seems much more questionable from this interview, as judged by his own children (who say he is doing better now on his second set of kids).
Turns out I didn't hallucinate the part about golfing to inspire his kids' work ethic, but it's from another episode: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-manage-your-goal-hierarchy-ep-458/
"Exactly. If we were going to try to teach parents something, it should be, “How do you model behaviors that your kids can follow?” That really framed my view of the world, which is that I’m not sure what you say to your kids matters very much. I think at some fundamental level, it’s what you model 24-hours-a-day in your own behavior. So, I think what my kids saw was they saw me willing to get up at 5 in the morning to go to the golf course to practice doing the same thing over and over. And that somehow instilled in them the idea that, even though it was golf, which seems stupid, that hard work and diligence paid off."
And as an aside, he also says he wasn't working hard at work at the time: "I was pretty lazy about academics by the time the kids came around, to be honest. I think I didn’t model as well as I probably should have."
(A relief to know that this memory, at least, was genuine. I was so certain he had said it.)
To which I would respond, he’s not taking his kids to the golf course, right? So they’re not there to see his hard work, the pride he feels in his good score, the camaraderie he feels with his golf buddies. All they know is that he’s not making pancakes with them Saturday morning, that he has something he values way more than that. Maybe if he’d modelled that hard work for them in his job, they’d be able to see the success of that hard work in a way that could be compared to their own schoolwork or their friends’ parents’ work; building relationships might have been a better thing to model on the weekends
I see more attractive young women on the golf course in recent years. My guess is that they tend to be daughters of golf-loving alpha males. A few generations ago their dads would have focused on their son's athletic careers, but now with smaller family sizes, executive dads focus on their daughters' golf games.
Steven Levitt retired fairly young for a U of Chicago economics professor to get in more time on the golf course.
He seems more like a corporate executive type than a professor.
I seemed to get in more famous spats with people who had a lot in common with me, such as Levitt and Gladwell, than with people who didn't. I don't believe Malcolm Gladwell is a golfer, but I could well imagine him being one if fate hadn't taken him to New York.
I was a ferrel kid…as were most of the kids in the early 60s. I left home after breakfast and didn’t return until I heard mom calling me home for supper. Everyone I knew was the same. Lots of kids (no birth control) and lots of fun. It was a great childhood. No Air conditioning. Only a few cartoons in the morning. 3 TV channels. I feel sorry for all the indoor kids today.
When you say that mom would call you for supper, does that mean you were always within voice range of your house? Or did you deliberately head back home around suppertime?
I'm obviously not Not Me, but this was a summer pattern for me growing up (90s Russia, a community of mostly summer residents with a few year-round ones). There was something of an expectation that I should generally be within sight or voice range, particularly during the week when it was just grandma and I; on weekends when mom came down from the city, she was more willing to go hunting for me, so I was allowed to say "we're going to XYZ" and go. I also suspect that there was a decent amount of flexibility in when mealtimes happened, i.e. if I wasn't easily found, the meal would just happen later (and I might get scolded). I don't remember how we handled the "bring a friend to lunch / dinner" in terms of communicating this to the friend's own family.
I was within voice range.
Having kids, and truly caring about something more than myself, was the key step in becoming a content adult. Nothing else in my life has ever provided that level of clarity and certainty.
And the first two years with twins was exhausting. But it gets much easier. And there are inevitably really rough spots along the way. I do think retiring the word "parenting" is a useful step... I don't use "brothering" or "husbanding" as it is all just part of being a family.
So, here's my unsolicited advice:
-whenever possible, have kids walk to school and play outside unsupervised. Get them a bus pass and/or a bike and let them explore on their own. Our 3 kids are regularly gone for most of a day and have done so since they were quite young. They have watches and usually have a time when they need to be back home.
-limit screen time to movies/actual shows on a television
-no video games for anyone
-no smart phones until at least high school and then with limitations
-do homework without distractions
-set aside time for "recreational" reading every day
-have supper together at night
-avoid the pay-to-play experiences (travel sports, private lessons, etc)
-let your kids be bored
-have them get a summer job
Agree completely except for private lessons. If your kid has an interest in music etc, get them the kindest and best teacher you can.
I don't disagree, but it seems like a chicken/egg question. I see so many parents driving their 4 or 6 year olds to music/dance/soccer lessons and the kids have no interest or aptitude in any of it. I think that type of premature over-scheduling likely drives kids away from activities.
Yes, but that's an example of paying for private lessons and forcing very young, uninterested kids into them. Agreed that that is a bad idea.
What sort of physical movement freedom at what age were you doing?
My 5 y.o. can bike a few km, but always with a parent to date, I'm concerned about road crossing in particular.
Busy roads were the boundaries. There is a busy road near our house and I would help the kids cross at 5 years old and they would walk the ~1/2 mile to school. But that was with a group, including older kids. When they were a bit older, when they would walk or bike to visit friends, they had to pick options that didn't require crossing those roads or I would get them past that spot. I think the details vary significantly by neighborhood and by a kid's maturity.
I don't know why people take a strong stance against video games specifically. They're better than TV on every dimension - they're more social, they offer goals and opportunity for agency and skill development. The educational benefits can be stronger. They force kids to reckon with failure and encourage them to overcome it.
It's just about which games you let them play and how much. I would rather let my kid play chess on my phone than watch a movie. I play Minecraft with him too, where we set ambitious creative goals for ourselves and work and problem solve to complete them, while bonding together. I've used it as a vehicle to teach him about science ("how does a furnace work?"), engineering, manufacturing, electricity (redstone), coding (redstone again), history ("do people really live in castles?").
This comment is high in combativeness and low in substance, and doesn't really deserve a reply. But I'll just say that *of course* I also endorse playing sports and such together too (even though it's also an activity made up of "meaningless, virtual, fake goals" like putting the ball in the net over and over, which develops "useless skills that don't translate anywhere else"). That goes without saying. But there's a lot of hours in a day, and when it's 5:30am, cold and dark outside, and we're trying not to wake mum, playing a game together for an hour is just better than watching TV in every way.
You playing with your kid sounds great but I'd guess that 99.999% of kids playing video games don't have that experience.
I think the strong stance is that video games absorb a huge amount of childhood and teen (and adult) hours beyond the point of learning or growing from the activity. Does any kid play 20 minutes of video games a day? I see a massive number of my kids' peers who mindlessly play for hundreds of hours a month. It is hugely addictive, to the point that I've seen 10 year olds playing fortnite on their phones while they are in the outfield during the middle of a little league game. For me, not having the temptation is much easier than trying to monitor and schedule and regulate, since the benefit, to me, is minimal at best.
As for whether video games are "better" than TV or movies, we'll have to disagree.
I don't think it matters if every other kid is addicted to games - that's just a choice that other parents have made. It's very easy to moderate your kids game time if you want to, the same way we can choose to restrict all other things that kids find addictive. There's even an app for Switch where you can set the amount of time they can play per day before it locks them out - though I haven't needed to use it so far.
This is not to try to change your mind - you're clearly a great parent and I'm sure your choices are right for you and your kids. I'm just putting forward a case for the other side. I see this opinion a lot and find it confusing that society generally sees games as the lowest form of entertainment, whereas I think they can be one of the best. To me it's like hearing that people won't let their kids read because they're worried they'll sit on twitter all day - the reading is not the problem.
> It's not easy once they are addicted and it's what they are used to.
I'm not sure what you mean - you can physically and digitally restrict kids from having access to games, so of course it's easy. But the point is you don't let them get addicted in the first place.
>And besides screens and perhaps some foods, what do children find addictive?
That probably mostly covers it, though "screens" covers quite a few of the activities I had in mind
I appreciate your measured tone (and I'll let you know that I am just an ok parent). A big part of my aversion to video games is my own experience. To the extent there are exploration/social/coordination benefits, those are, in my view, much better developed doing sports and outdoor activities. And, if left to their own devices, my kids, and most kids, would play video games for hours, which requires a level of supervision that runs counter to my goal of letting them be more autonomous. Obviously individual results will vary and I'm glad you found a balance that works.
Ok yeah, I see where you're coming from
> I don't think it matters if every other kid is addicted to games - that's just a choice that other parents have made. It's very easy to moderate your kids game time if you want to, the same way we can choose to restrict all other things that kids find addictive.
Some people would say that "every other kid being addicted to games" is a sign that they're a memetic hazard overall, just like Instagram or Tik Tok.
And sure, you can make sure your kids smoke responsibly, while you're in the house and supervising - but this vastly increases their chance of being a heavy smoker later in life (by 1.4x, per another comment in this thread).
My own take on video games (as a person who loved them as a boy) is that the reason they're a memetic hazard is twofold:
1). They counterfeit effort and progress in the real world, by giving you much-easier-than-reality progress ladders and tangible successes for median levels of effort, all the while giving you the social status and "cred" people crave, and that would in its proper form stimulate actual achievement. There's a decent chunk of gen Z boys who essentially opt out of life for this comforting pseudo-progress and status ladder, rather than achieving things in the real world.
2) It's a representative sample of the adversarial dynamics visible in things like Tik Tok, Netflix, and junk food, wherein thousands of Phd's on the other side have pooled their collective brainpower for years to optimize against individual people's inbuilt drives and neurological hooks, in the service of promoting increased engagement and recurring revenue. It's just a matter of good principles to opt out of as many of these adversarial systems as you can, both personally and on your kids' behalf.
To reign in the hyperbole, something like 2.8% of kids are clinically addicted to video games, and those that are are a particular kind of kid:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9103383/#sec3-ijerph-19-05587
> 24 participants met IGD criteria, giving an IGD prevalence rate of 2.8% in this sample. It is noteworthy that the mean score for IGD severity was 4.17 out of 20, suggesting that most people in this sample had low levels of IGD symptomology. It is also noteworthy that those who met criteria for IGD had significantly higher IGD symptom severity, social exclusion and impulsiveness, and significantly lower self-esteem, control of their environment, parental attachment, family connectedness, and self-control.
Playing games is just one of many activities that parents should teach their children to enjoy in moderation. There shouldn't be much concern about child becoming addicted while a child - this is easy to control if the parent chooses to. So the question is just about whether playing games in moderation as a child makes them more likely to be addicted as an adult. I don't know whether that's the case - I don't think smoking is at all a fair comparison because you're talking about a chemical vs behavioural addiction, the latter of which is much easier to teach a kid to avoid. When children become adults they have access to a million things they could become addicted to and I think helping them practice self control at home is better than letting them discover it all for the first time at 18. But I think genetics is probably a bigger factor anyway.
But I also disagree that video games as a medium is some uniquely addictive thing. In 2 you're referring to a subset of games - the freemium/IAP/subscription model. You won't find those games in my house* and I'm not endorsing them**. They are the Tik Tok of the games world. But people don't ban kids from the medium of video because Tik Tok exists. Or ban kids from reading because Twitter exists. The negative qualities of games that you describe in 1 all have their positive mirrors if they're used in the right way, with benefits in education and mental health*** (as well as just being fun, artistic, a source of inspiration etc etc).
* well, Minecraft does have IAPs now unfortunately, but they were tacked on by Microsoft after they bought it - they aren't integrated into gameplay.
** though I think it's fine for people to play in moderation, it's just junk food
*** https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8277305/
> Overall, we have demonstrated the current evidence wherein commercial video games serve as a useful corollary and easily accessible tool for decreasing the severity of symptoms of depression and anxiety
> To reign in the hyperbole, something like 2.8% of kids are clinically addicted to video games, and those that are are a particular kind of kid:
I believe this is an unrealistic narrowing of the overall likely impact, predicated on an overly specific definition of "addiction."
If you look more broadly, the number of prime age men not in the labor force was 3% in 1955, and ~6% in 1976, and 11.4% in 2022.
For millennial men specifically, about 14% at age 25 aren't in the labor force, versus 7% of Baby Boomer men at the same age.
The difference between 2000 and 2016 in men aged 21-30 who were NEET's (not in employment or education) was 8% back then and 15% now, and this is specifically lower than the trend for their older confreres over the same time period.
https://imgur.com/a/7bK7spT
Erik Hurst notes in a 2021 economic paper (Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men) about this trend "During the period 2004-15, approximately 60 percent of the 2.3 hours of increased leisure time per week for young men was spent playing video games, while younger women and older men and women spent negligible extra leisure time in this way."
We also all know that college enrollment for men is down relative to women, and continues to trend downwards.
I agree that it's not wholly video games, porn is almost certainly a part of it too, along with the usual free time sponges like Netflix, Tik Tok etc.
But I think you can point to a fairly strong and worrisome overall trend of "when young men get endless porn and video games and other easily accessed superstimuli, a decent chunk of them will opt out of the struggle to achieve in favor of these easier comforts".
Sure, it's not 100% of them - but 10-15% is quite a large enough effect size for me to play it safe. We spend similar amounts of time / effort demonizing smoking, which has about the same prevalence, and probably a *smaller* overall effect on all cause mortality than being an unemployed man and lowering your lifetime earnings significantly.
I'm skeptical that screen time and reading are that much different (as in, one is much more beneficial or harmful than the other).
Why would that be the case?
The true dichotomy I see is between consuming media (books, videos) and physical, real life play or socialization.
You're cherry-picking. You could easily make the same argument in reverse.
My perspective is anecdotal and personal. I value the written word and can remember books that I read 40 years ago, and the impact they still have on me. I think reading develops empathy, as the reader assumes the perspective of the protagonist which feels very different than the mindset I've experienced playing games. I also love learning through reading nonfiction which, again, feels drastically different. My kids have friends who choose to stay inside on their consoles rather than ride their bikes to the beach. The experiences feel so different to me that I cannot help but believe that the impact on kids is different too.
I was mentally comparing books more to movies than games.
They say that Shakespeare's work are meant to be performed, rather than read. If that is true, which is better, to read Shakespeare, or to watch a Shakespeare movie?
"I also love learning through reading nonfiction" some people learn from good documentaries.
If we must discuss games, there are many types of games. I grew up playing Monkey Island and similar "graphic adventure" games. Those were wordy narrative games, completely different in nature from the reflex-based games you probably have in mind.
Another type of games are strategy games which require a lot of thinking on the player's part and that have no reflex-based component.
The book equivalent of a video game is a choose-your-own-adventure book. I grew up reading a lot of those. Recently I've seen bits of playthroughs of the "visual novel" game Slay the Princess. It's essentially a choose-your-own-adventure book on screen, with beautiful drawings and voice acting added to the textual component. These "visual novels" are today the most common type of wordy narrative videogame, having dethroned the graphic adventures I grew up with.
"My kids have friends who choose to stay inside on their consoles rather than ride their bikes to the beach" I agree that staying inside is very different from physical activity outside. However, reading is one of the activities you do when you stay inside, and belongs to the same group as watching movies or playing games.
I live sandwiched between a river and a canal. They're lovely, but there's lots of opportunities for drowning. About once a month a young man (usually drunk and aged 19-22) drowns in it at night. Presumably it's not children because their parents are preventing them from engaging in dangerous behaviour around rivers and once young men become adults the safety is off.
We play video games instead. You can't drown if you're playing a video game! (They do also get plenty of supervised outdoor time. We walked 3.5 miles today, to the outdoor pool plus some exploring).
I work as a teacher for some after-school programs at my local school. I'm not even allowed to let the kids go to the bathroom by themselves. I have to instruct them to take another kid with them for "safety." The bathroom isn't even in another building or anything. This is apparently a universal rule according to my employer.
The problem isn't just that helicopter parenting is impractical and costly but that it keeps escalating.
My personal theory is that this is the real reason that fertility drops with women's education. It's not because educated women are more selfish. It's exactly the opposite. Women use their more rights to do helicopter parenting.
Helicopter parenting is largely a phenomenon pushed by women peers. Most men don't police their friend's parenting skills. This is largely a women thing. Perhaps people's individual experience is different from what I'm describing here.
> Most men don't police their friend's parenting skills. This is largely a women thing.
Yes. Although in my bubble, most women also don't police other people's parenting skills. (Maybe that's because when they do, we simply stop spending time with them.)
"I'm not even allowed to let the kids go to the bathroom by themselves. I have to instruct them to take another kid with them for "safety."
Wow. I have never heard of that. I can only imagine it is an over-reaction of caution on the part of the school administration from terror of being sued by some angry and litigious parent about "you let my little Johnny go to the bathroom on his own and he slipped and fell and broke his tooth" (which in turn will drive up insurance premiums even higher).
I mean, back in the days when I was going to primary school, a neighbour's kid *did* slip and fall in the bathroom and break a tooth, but there was no notion of "we must immediately sue everyone in sight" about this back then.
I should clarify that this was a private school in Australia. But I'd imagine parenting conventions are fairly similar in both nations.
Your kids are adorable :-)
Kids are a joy until they turn 13 and start on the road to becoming like us. I grew up in the 60's and we felt safe and wandered everywhere. Living spaces were more homogenous, we were expected to and read books, and Sundays were not like the rest of the week. Perfect world? Hardly, but definitions were sharper, "one size" didn't fit all. The speed of change has accelerated to the point of barely being able to evaluate what just happened before the next thing does. In an only a couple of generations moorings are lost, the past is dismissed as a failure. Very difficult to discern what kind of world we are leaving to the future when we barely function in the one we are living in. I could say, "Start with the Classics, the Greeks and Romans," but that pretty much falls on deaf ears these days. Our trappings have changed, but we still fear the dark and the unknown. And we all end up dead. Strange, but there are days that's a rather comforting thought. Sorry if I've offended anyone. Not. Ha, ha.
14 is the worst age. I was a screaming fury when I turned 14 (hard to imagine, I know!) I was quiet up till then, and when I got into my middle and late teens it was better, but for some reason 14 was the worst year when everything went sideways.
Scott, why did you choose a gendered division of labor for childcare?
I have two well-paying jobs (this blog and my psychiatry practice). My wife lost her job a few months before becoming pregnant and decided not to immediately look for a new one in the middle of pregnancy, and later, in the middle of child-rearing (especially given what the programmer job market looks like right now).
She also seems better at it than I am, and I'm not 100% sure she would trust me to do too much more of it. I also suspect she's gotten angry that people bother her for being a stay-at-home mom and might keep doing it out of stubbornness just to annoy those people.
Quite similar dynamics in our house. I'm also much better at dealing with the chronic sleep-deprivation than my husband, which is perhaps biologically influenced.
There are a few interesting studies, e.g.:
"Females’ reaction to sleep deprivation, characterized by reduced risky choices and increased egoism compared to males, may be related to intrinsic psychological gender differences, such as in the way men and women weigh up probabilities in their decision-making, and/or to the different neurofunctional substrate of their decision-making." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4368427/
My guess, fwiw, is that a lot of the panic you feel (which I also feel) is related to some amount sleep deprivation, which makes having a busy/tedious schedule much much harder.
If his wife is happy with it and it suits them both, why not? Some people are happier being stay-at-home moms, some people are better suited to be house husbands. I think the twins' mother can indicate if she wants to go out to work and express if this arrangement doesn't work for her, since I can't see Scott doing the "I am the head of this household, you must submit me to me!" thing.
Screens. My kids are addicted to theirs since their first fire-tablet. My son (now 10) learnt English mostly by youtube-videos (minecraft et al). The youngest (2.5) is asking me often for "lingo" or "kanakekid" - but why should I deny him duolingo-for-kids or khan-academy-kids?!? (except that I need my phone, sometimes - and he often manages to switch to youtube AND to send my boss voice-mails!).
But then, we were glued to the few kids-shows on TV in 1977 - and we did go outside and played with the kids (oh, there were so many of them in the 80 yards around our flat!!! Now: none, same park-corner. The playground 100 yards away still has a few.). Oh, range: Here in Europe, those US-cops seem unreal. GO for that orange t-shirt-plan! And still, our kids have less range than they used to. I walked around unsupervised with my pal when we were 4 - when we still lived in the city-centre. And I heard in villages during farm-work, the small kids would be put under a tree. On leashes. Longer than the ones on daycare-kids I saw in NYC. Legit, it seems. If people have just one kid, sure they must go mad. Lucky you got twins. Time to go for a couple more. ;) Us subscribers adore Kai and Lyra (whatever their real names are).
"Adolescence": Yep, no own smart-phone for my kids till ... 16. Or 14? Dumb-phone: sure (so they do not have a good reason to ask for an evil one).
If you feel overwhelmed by childcare and you can hire a good nanny/babysitter, then you should definitely do it.
I think one can uncouple the love they feel for their particular child from "how much do I enjoy doing this kind of thing?" There's a huge range in the amt of enjoyment people get from spending time with kids of particular age groups. I love toddlers and kids up through age 12. After age 12 it's child-dependent (although I'll note that my friends' teenagers are terrific). For infants I'm not related to, I will read them a book and chat with them, but I'm probably checking the clock out of the corner of my eye.
Likewise, there are all kinds of jobs other people seek out that would be very hard for me. I would find them stressful, uncomfortable, boring, or pointless.
I haven't read Caplan's book but ever since I heard of it I've been wondering...does he address the effect of pregnancy on women's lives and bodies? Is he an advocate for surrogacy?
Maybe it's not that The Ancients let their children roam more than we do ours (I'm a father of a 3yr old), but that they thought that children were fundamentally more robust and whose feelings were less worthy of consideration.
To illustrate, take Scott's kids-on-the-table example. If they aren't going to be watched they can't be on the table. So what if they want to, they don't know what to want and are bad at thinking. If they tantrum, so what? Insert earplugs and let them figure it out. I do this with my kid and he always recovers, and we always play later, and he seems to still like me.
If you think of children as small adults, then you will want to respect their wishes and ameliorate their pain. This is perhaps noble, but very very hard because, as illustrated, their wishes are bad (I of course don't mean wishes for things like food, water, love. You must provide those unconditionally.) and their pain is extremely explosive and irrational (though also short lived). On the other hand, if you think children need to be told what to think and how to feel, and that they're robust and can get over things unscarred, you have a lot more leeway for action and control. All those sentences certainly sound very trad.
Of course this logic breaks down eventually as they age. You should probably not 'count to three' with a teenager, and certainly never with an adult. But at three I think it's sensible, or maybe I'm just an asshole.
It's very possible that you are an asshole, but being an asshole works well.
Assuming that's right, I'm with you.
“Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds?“
Older kids.
The acceptable age for baby sitting is rising and the number of siblings is falling so this strategy employed by larger families is largely impossible now.
Source: Oldest of six kids who spent a lot of time wrangling his younger siblings. I was probably baby sitting my younger siblings at like 9 or 10 for a few hours unsupervised.
At 36, I’m old enough I watched safetyism take over, as my next brother and I were free range and rode a mile to/from school at ages 7 and 5, but my younger siblings were chauffeured. My mom didn’t get more scared, but I think she followed the crowd.
Also I have a 9-month old and I think you simply made the mistake of having two babies at once, not any over parenting.
My mother was literally raised by her older sisters because her mother died when she was very young, and her dad moved to another city for work.
I became a dad a couple of months before you. It’s completely understandable, I think, to be overwhelmed and exhausted by raising toddler twins. You aren’t doing anything wrong, and it is indeed hard. If Caplan doesn’t think it is hard, he is an outlier and I’m not sure you need to worry about it.
But the fear that your kids won’t turn out to be successful in life unless you shuttle them around activities and drive yourself crazy…you can let go of that I think. And maybe Caplan’s book is more useful for addressing anxieties of that sort, which mostly come up when kids leave the toddler stage anyway.
Kudos on the babysitter. Without daycare, my wife and I would be screwed.
Basically there is so much variation in the infant - toddler stages that if any one parent tells you they aren’t stressed while you yourself are freaking out, odds are to me that they have an idiosyncratic situation that you can’t easily replicate on your end.
Enjoyed this! However, was surprised to see no mention of the (reversed) Flynn effect here? Seems to scream out between the lines…
I think either that's defined as decreasing intelligence (in which case it's just repeating these results without explaining them) or is sometimes explained by dysgenics (differential reproduction of lower-IQ people) in which case it's way too slow to produce any effect observable on the time scale of a decade.
Or it's explained by measurement non-invariance, in which case it's orthogonal to the issue: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1911626115413590154.
Did this book made you want to have more kids? I bought it yesterday for my sisters future husband who only wants three kids.
Twins are definitely an outlier in terms of care - one child (even at one) can be corralled and managed, but two that you keep together (rightfully so!) will definitely require a lot more continuous oversight. Probably for a few years because as they grow they’ll start to conspire to find ways to avoid oversight.
In general, I think Caplan is right about over-parenting - it doesn’t seem to pay any dividends in terms of the success for the child, makes you miserable, and may make the child struggle more on being independent.
In traditional societies almost all childrearing is "secondary". Babies are held or watched over by various caregivers, who rarely give them exclusive attention. When they're a bit older, older siblings or cousins accompany the younger kids more while parents work, do chores, or gossip.
This feels good to increase at the margins in modern families. With my friends with multiple kids, the first-borns tend to be raised in a weird, over-stimulating, constant-parental-attention environment, which feels a little unhealthy. When younger siblings are born, all the children are afforded a healthier degree of neglect and learn to play by themselves.
Just a guess, but perhaps your first kids being twins means that you feel the need and pressure to give both kids attention, and you haven't undergone the triage process that a younger sibling forces upon you.
I expect Scott to follow-up with an addendum on how sibling care works - surprised that wasn't in the study, but maybe there are other, obvious ways and means in the past that we don't naturally consider because of other changes. The Little House on the Prairie, for example, has the same `go outside and play' approach albeit with a different set of dangers!
A small tip from a disease ecologist and a parent of a toddler in daycare. You have two years of them being sick about 50% of the time and infecting everyone. Your only choice is whether you prefer this to happen when they're in daycare or kindergarten.
My wife has done some bio-related work and claims that kids' immune systems improve significantly around five, and if you can hold out until then the pain is a lot less.
I did some more research. With the caveat that I don't research human diseases (or even mammals), I think there are a few separate aspects to consider for daycare vs kindergarten.
1) Chances of infection
2) Severity of disease
3) Chances of transmission to family members
1) The cumulative disease burden for children dacare vs kindergarten seems similar. This is what I meant in my initial comment. Everyone gets one or two rounds of the same childhood diseases until you develop adaptive immunity.
https://archivos.evidenciasenpediatria.es/files/41-11095-RUTA/00022363-201012000-00009.pdf
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11814371/
2) Your wife is correct. Kindergarten age children have more mature immune systems that handle infections better. I'll spare you a wave of citations on this one, but RSV, flu, ear infections, rotations, etc. are all less severe in older children.
3) This is harder to quantify with a few quick searches. Also, we're working with averages here and damn near every immune response, disease burden and shedding rate I have worked with is gamma distributed and the extremes can matter a lot for transmission and resistance. Young kids seem to transmit SARS-CoV-2 more readily and this probably generalizes. If you have a household member that catches everything, the difference between older and younger kids may not matter.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8369380/
https://www.jmir.org/2024/1/e44249
A crazy thing is that sometimes around age 50 to 55 I stopped having colds/flus several times per year. When I was a young man in my 30-something prime, I was debilitated by an infection about four weeks per year. Today, in my dotage, I feel under the weather for a few days per year.
It seems to me that the important thing isn't your kids' chances of being kidnapped while playing outside unsupervised, but the chances that something equally bad would happen to them while doing something else. What are kids today doing instead of walking around by themselves? They're being driven somewhere (39,345 fatalities last year according to https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813710, although I don't know how many of those were children), or they're in a building (198 kids under 14 died in home fires in 2024 according to https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/civilian-fatalities?startDate=2024-01-01&endDate=2024-12-31&searchChildren=1), or they're under the supervision of a trusted adult (most child kidnappings and murders are committed by someone the victims knows; I'm not bothering to cite a source since it's in the article). There's no such thing as a risk-free situation, so why worry about strangers more than other potential killers?
From your Wilkie and Cullen (2023) paper:
> This method identified stepparents as parents about half the time but did not identify other parental figures as parents (e.g., Grandparents).
So it would seem that the source can not account for the decline of the extended family or for the falling number of children (specifically older siblings) that could take over certain parenting responsibilities. Parents spend more time parenting not necessarily because the workload has increased, but because it's no longer being shared among the family.
Regarding super-stimuli...
Several months back we noticed that our toddler was starting to demand TV time way more than we were comfortable with. So we told him that we were limiting TV to three days a week. We let him choose the days (he picked Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday...with a little gentle nudging from us).
After about a week he had totally accepted the new reality and his TV viewing habits plummeted.
It isn't just that he has fewer opportunities to watch TV. He's become less interested in taking advantage of the opportunities that he does have. He frequently ignores Wednesday TV day, even if we remind him. That is partly due to the weather getting nicer and having more opportunities to go outside, but this started even back when it was still cold and ugly out.
A big reason I think this worked is that we gave him (bounded) agency to choose which days he wanted to watch TV. So when he asked if he could watch TV on a Thursday, we said no and reminded him that it was his choice. This didn't eliminate the struggle when transitioning to the new regime, but I think it helped.
All kids are different, so YMMV. But I think the general strategy of putting a gated fence up around super stimuli, and giving your children some sense of agency in when they get to open the gate, can be effective.
This is really interesting. I think you're right that this is a classic YMMV kind of technique, but in cases like yours where it works it's an incredibly wholesome win-win. We're right at the boundary of how much TV feels comfortable, and occasionally wander over it, so we might be giving this a try!
I find all concerns about screens to be completely overblown and almost exactly the same as my parents' generation's worries about TV. I have a 5yo. She's had a phone since she was 2. It bores her often (even with algorithmically-recommended Youtube content!) and she's happy to put it down whenever there is anything fun to do. She also goes to preschool, takes jiu jitsu, and has gymnastics lessons, and has never once displayed any kind of phone withdrawal or anything from any of her activities. Watching shows or playing games on her phone is just one of many fun activities, and it's not even her favorite one.
The thing to remember about kids is that the best way to make them ferociously desire something is to tell them they can't have it. Let them have all they want and they at least have an opportunity to develop self-regulating skills. We did the same thing with candy. My 5yo gets all the candy she wants, whenever she wants. She has like 1-2 pieces of candy per day, and sometimes forgets about it for days at a time, because it's just not a special or exotic thing to her.
Quoting teachers whining about kids being "phone zombies' or "unable to read Colson Whitehead" always make me laugh. In my adult life, I probably read more than at least 90% of the country. I never once read one of my assigned books in high school unless I could fit it in during class or study hall. Assigned reading is boring! And of course teachers love it when staring at the wall is the only alternative to listening to their boring lectures. In my day, I had to sneak a book under my desk to avoid dying from boredom. By all accounts, Bryan Caplan's kids are extremely well educated, due in large part to their absence from traditional schools with their "I speak you listen" style of education.
The teacher quoted seemingly teaches at a college. Of course college students are worse now! Way more people are going to college (~50% of HS graduates in 1980, ~68% by 2010)! That necessarily means that either the population has gotten significantly smarter (unlikely) or dumber kids are enrolling in college.
Do you realize that most people who use cocaine use it responsibly, just for fun every once in a while, right? The idea that everyone who uses cocaine is an addict is drug warrior propaganda
ADHD, as well as many kinds of other mental health issues seems pretty overrepresented in here.
I went on sertraline for OCD and I have become massively more easily bored with the internet ever since. And in general, I can just like, sit and be idle without constant stimulation and distraction now, it's insane.
> I had to sneak a book under my desk to avoid dying from boredom.
Heh, school reading not just bored, but actually enraged me, so I began writing my own stories during classes in high school :) That actually proved to be the whole extent of my teenage rebellion. And before that, I remember spending some Literature classes writing a QuickBasic program, a text adventure I called "Castle of Horrors". So many if's & goto's...
I was an early "screen kid" in that respect that I had a computer (a ZX Spectrum) at home since age of 6, and I really wanted nothing to do with "the outside". I'm sure my parents would be happier if I roamed a little, but I never wanted to. And when I spent summers in the country, without computer access, all I did was inventing tabletop games that tried to replicate computer games to play with my only friend (his mother, a former professional skier, and wife of Olympic team ski trainer, forcibly kicked us out of the house sometimes to play outside; I think she thought I was a bad influence on her son).
On a personal level I have the luxury to spend a LOT of time with my young children, and although I don't love doing it (it's often tedious and all-consuming) I sort of feel a moral imperative to do it, and absolutely do not regret not going the day-care/nanny way.
When all is said and done, one doesn't get to spend a lot of time with their child, especially once they enter school. I feel like it's important for my life satisfaction, and hopefully theirs, to know that I did my utmost to spend whatever time I could muster with them.
This sounds like exactly my situation, and is exactly how I feel about it - although also, thankfully, the older they get, the more fun / less draining it is, I am finding. So I guess it's self-congratulatory to say, but you're absolutely doing the right thing!
🤝
I think-- having six kids between the ages of 5 and 14, all with some level of special needs-- that one thing it's very hard to measure is the drain of mental load when engaged in primary care. Thirty minutes of feeding and changing an infant do not feel the same as thirty minutes of trying to play a game with a toddler (while keeping them physically safe, teaching them social skills like turn taking, staying engaged in a game that's mind-numbingly boring to you and exciting to them) and neither are the same as talking for thirty minutes with a thirteen year old about a video game or book or their own world-events anxiety.
Throw in twins (which I also have) and the physical and mental load involved in infant and toddler care is even heavier. It's so difficult to tease apart how much of this is inherent to a certain age of child, how much is socially-conditioned pressure/expectations we put on ourselves as parents, how much is poor understanding of child development from lack of experience (ie the worry load of not knowing what's normal and what isn't), and how much is the absence/presence of the mythical village. We can build a village via nannies and sitters and friends, if we don't have one out of family and neighbors-- but that requires work and money and developing relational trust. We say people used to have a village, but that's also dependent on culture and location and economic status, etc. In short, it's always more complicated than it looks (it's hard to gather completely accurate, unbiased data that accounts for everything) while simultaneously being simpler than it looks (caring for dependent humans has always been hard on some level).
These thoughts aren't a rebuttal to anything, just things I thought of while reading this. In an adjacent vein to that book and the topic of physical roaming, I think you'd really enjoy Michael Bond's book "Here and There," especially the early chapters about childhood freedom to roam and the impact that has on brain development and anxiety. It covers some similar concerns you mentioned here without being preachy about what we OUGHT to do, as if we have clear answers. It's made me think a lot about the ways I provide my kids with space/freedom to explore and engage with environment without getting the police called on us for neglect-- a constant concern when living in town and in close proximity to well-meaning strangers.
>"This has expanded into a broader principle: don’t let toddlers know a superstimulus exists if you’re not prepared to fight them about whether they get to have it all the time."
I initially really liked this rule. My hesitancy is: what isn't a super stimulus in today's environment? Anything better than playing with sticks and mud? My fallback advice is even more general: pick your battles. Children are aggressive invading armies, but as the general of the defensive forces you can pick the setting and time for your battles.
I've certainly noticed my kids having the freakout over wanting to watch phones. But there are lots of other things I've also had to fight them on not having all the time, or exactly right now when they want it. Including but not limited to: aardvarks (old school tv show Arthur), bacon, baths, blankets (in the washer), bubbles, candy, cards, chalk, coins, crayons, etc. I'm gonna stop there before I end up alphabetically listing everything in my house.
I think phones are possibly getting a uniquely large share of the blame for what amounts to a bunch of different superstimulus activities all rolled into one package. You can be socializing, reading a book, watching funny videos, ordering super delicious food, and playing games all on your phone. From the outside it all looks the same though.
The parenting angle here is that even superstimuli can get boring for people eventually. I've seen my daughter voluntarily put down watching videos on the phone to go play with baby dolls (we got to this point when both of us were sick with covid and barely able to stay awake, much less parent). It took about 3 hours though. So maybe we can just worry less about the superstimuli.
Your first list of examples are normal for your toddlers to ridiculously fight you over. None of them are superstimuli; it's just toddlers being grabby. With your list of possible phone activities, yes, you can identify different categories of activities, but does it matter? We all know what 99% of phone time is population-wide, and it's not reading books.
I'm glad your daughter is holding up well against the threat, almost certainly due to high quality parenting leading up to those encouraging examples you're seeing, but the threat is extremely real. Get some up-close time with a kid who has been raised from infancy on Instagram Reels and I guarantee you will change your mind.
There was a discussion in the comment section on /r/petfree about whether babies and toddlers should be barred from indoor public spaces, unless explicitly marked as child friendly.
Here's a great reason why they absolutely should not be barred from such places. Parenting becomes a lot more enjoyable when you can do normal things, like go to a restaurant, brewery, or grocery store, with your kids in tow. And that makes life better for everyone.
Your life is going to change as a parent, but that doesn't mean you have to give up all the pre-kid things you enjoy. Go out into the world with your kids. If they make a scene, do your best to get it under control. If you just can't get it under control, then maybe you'll have to pivot and change your plans. But dust yourself off and try again. If people sneer at you, sneer back with a sense of moral superiority because you're in the right here.
My freshman year of high school, I went to a small school where every student was given an iPad on which to keep our textbook and take notes.
As you can probably imagine, this led to a lot of goofing off. But my key insight as a 13/14 year old is that while the teachers came down hard on the kids clearly playing video games, they didn't bother those of us reading dense text on it, even if in retrospect it was probably pretty obvious that I was paying 0% attention to the class. Somehow I found SSC and over the course of the school year worked my way through its entire corpus.
...and then ended up being an atheist vegan EA, much to my Catholic parents' disappointment. Brainrot is inevitable and the wheel keeps turning.
"When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies." That's the *actual* kicker, ain't it? The trick isn't that less hours of parenting should be done, it's that you should outsource (some of) your parenting. We can extrapolate this: "If something you think is mandatory stresses you out, figure out how to outsource it" can apply to parenting, housecleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, driving....
Of course, this form of outsourcing is only advice for people wealthy enough to pay for it. I'm struggling with this right now honestly: I *could* afford to hire help I guess, but things keep happening lately (Microsoft's layoff the other day that included highly technically accomplished engineers being a recent top-of-mind example) that make me more and more reluctant to spend money that freely.
This feels like a good place to post Ozy's The Iron Mathematics of Daycare:
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/the-iron-mathematics-of-day-care/
TL;DR: Since daycares need a low ratio of staff to kids, even the cheapest possible daycare is going to be pretty expensive. (That ratio is required by law, but even without laws, there are only so many babies one human can take care of at once.)
Thanks for linking that excellent post. Now I want to see a daycare in California advertising "we have an unlocked liquor cabinet and don't wash our hands after changing diapers, but at least we don't have tuberculosis!"
Humor aside, that all squares with how I think about daycare. Simultaneously way too expensive, but would also make me feel like I'm criminally mistreating the workers just by using it.
I had to laugh at Caplan there. Not to get all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but for the first fifteen years of my life I lived in a country area four miles outside our town. That doesn't *sound* like a lot, but it is when your family only has one car and your father needs that for work so it's gone all day.
Until I was seven, we didn't have running water (and we only got that because the farmers in the area needed water for their dairy cattle, went in on a group water scheme, and we were allowed join in on the line). How did we manage for water before that? Walked to the pump in a field (another farmer's field) with buckets every day, and my father got a milk churn which he filled up with water for the day. Want to wash or use hot water? Boil a kettle or heat a large pot on the cooker.
We didn't get an indoor toilet and bathroom until I was twelve. Want to bathe? Boil a kettle, do the Dolly Parton Wash* in a basin** or keep filling the plastic bath tub in the kitchen once a week for the weekly bath. How did we manage for lavatory facilities? Let's not get into that, just mention "chamber pots" and that I helped my father dig the septic tank when I was around nine when he converted an old shed into an outside toilet (after every flush we refilled the tank by bucket with rain water collected in a barrel).
My mother looked after herself, my father, her bedridden mother, and eventually four children up until we moved into town when I was fifteen under these conditions (gradually improving over the years, as I said).
I remember my mother *hand washing* clothes in a plastic bath outside. I could go on, but I think you get the gist.
After that "you have to spend more than an hour at a time with your kids? just hire another nanny!" - well, that does certainly sound like First World Problems 😁
* “People have often asked me how we girls managed any privacy in a house with so many boys and no private rooms. It was difficult. We used to bathe with a washcloth from a pan of water. We would first start with our necks and faces and wash down as far as possible. Then we would wash the road dust from our feet and wash up as far as possible. Later, when the boys were out of the room, we would wash “possible.”
** Ours was a plain plastic wash basin, but I grew up referring to "wash hand stands" because that's what I heard them called and older houses still had the likes of these (not as elaborate):
https://dustyoldthing.com/antique-spotlight-washstands/
Was this pretty normal in your area, or were your parents following a different drummer as would usually be the case with such a recitation, if from anyone in America under say 65?
Oh, this was normal. I often say I had a perfectly ordinary 19th century upbringing 😀 For whatever reason (probably money) the county council had not extended the water supply outside the town, so everyone was getting their water from pumps, wells, or springs. When my mother wanted a proper bath, she would go into town to her nephew's house.
The neighbours and family members scattered over the area were living in similar 'council cottages' with similar needs for getting their water from their own sources. For some elderly relatives, they were still cooking on open fires (sometimes in addition to having gas cookers) up until the 1980s:
https://irishfoodhub.com/cooking-over-turf-rediscovering-ancient-irish-cooking-methods/
https://www.facebook.com/Irishfarmingvideos/videos/baking-on-a-turf-fire-traditional-irish-baking/2162716823944179/
The funny/ironic thing was that due to the Rural Electrification Scheme of the 1940s. electricity supply was finally rolled out to rural areas, so we had electricity but no running water or sewerage!
https://www.theirishstory.com/2021/06/07/and-then-there-was-light-electrification-in-rural-ireland/
Does ‘council cottage’ mean the housing was in the gift of the local council?
"We can extrapolate this: "If something you think is mandatory stresses you out, figure out how to outsource it" can apply to parenting, housecleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, driving...."
Correct.
My youngest is a few months younger than your twins, and I can confirm that there is not much you can do to make an active baby/toddler less work besides "have someone else to do some of it."
In re: free range -- no, it absolutely works and does not require you to let your kid scroll algorithmically curated short-form video indefinitely. But you can't be twenty ticks more free range than everyone around you: if there are no kids in your neighborhood, or the only kids are obsessively surveilled (perhaps because you live in an area full of homeless drug addicts that most people don't consider a safe environment for unsupervised children), people will call the police. If you live in a neighborhood full of twelve-year-olds riding their bikes or e-scooters to the library, sports, or friends' houses, you're much less likely to get a second glance when your eight-year-old is walking to the ice cream shop. First ring suburbs (many of which are now incorporated in official cities!) are often the best places for kid-walkability.
I was thinking very similarly (parent of an adventurous three year old). Like I aspire to have a more 'free range' kid, but it only seems feasible to be at the top of the range of 'normal' for my area, not recreating the freedoms kids 100 years ago had.
> Don’t run yourself ragged rushing your kids to gymnastics classes they don’t even like.
Over-scheduling is a trope, and yeah it's a thing but tends to happen much later than the toddler years.
My quibble is that at this age you will be tired whether you have a planned activity or not, since kids demand your engagement and attention. They don't solo play *that* much yet. If they can get by with less of you, it's only because there are other adults or older siblings around. Factoring that a) our families are no longer gigantic, b) the grandparents don't hover around always if ever, c) the default at leisure is no longer intermingling with extended family (or friends with kids), then all of that falls on you. I'm sympathetic to the idea that environmental factors like multi-generational housing and cultural expectation of grandparents can boost fertility, as well as living very close to either friends with kids or relatives.
Here in the burbs, fleets of kids cycling around is a common sight, usually above 9 years old. I could foresee younger ones being part of this so long as there are enough older kids.
Twins are just a whole other ballgame. I speak from experience; our other kids could do things like go fishing at age 2 and we NEVER tried that with our twins together at that age. The trouble is that there's always someone else at the same developmental stage to reinforce whatever idea one gets. So instead of an older sibling who would be grossed out by emptying training potties all over the floor, or a younger sibling who isn't capable of joining in the fun of climbing onto the fridge, you get someone whose reaction to it all is "Brilliant! I'm in!" I always said the theme song of my twins was "You've got the brawn, I've got the brains, let's make lots of money" because one had the muscle to, for example, right the kitchen chairs we'd overturned so they couldn't climb, and one had the idea to get her twin to right them and then the agility to do the climbing. If there was something I actually had to get done, like a phone call or cooking, I would pay for it by cleaning up the disaster afterwards. Every. Time. (And this was with three older siblings for those twins. But you can only lean on a 9 year-old so much and I didn't want her to never have her own kids after feeling like she'd spent her childhood raising siblings.)
Mine are 10 now and it's fine. But it's just incredibly hard with multiples for about the first 5 years, sorry. It's not you, it's them. But twins are still great and I'm kind of sorry we didn't get another set, only another singleton.
Kind of reminds me of all the dumb things I did in high school. Kids all hanging around other kids the same age, learning how to behave from other X year olds, is maybe not the best way to do things.
I'm a big believer in childhood independence but this post made me think a bit harder about the trade-offs: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2023/10/18/kids-are-much-less-likely-to-be-killed-by-cars-than-in-the-past. A big drop in childhood mortality is fewer traffic deaths, and the big driver of that is fewer pedestrian and cycling deaths. The decline in kids walking and cycling is probably a big driver of that decline.
Child independence and the benefits to larger family still outweigh the costs for me, but it's not the free lunch as the headline statistics imply.
I think you forgot one point Bryan makes which is crucial: the first year really is overwhelming (and I am sure twins add significant work). But it passes. Bryan emphasizes we shouldn't evaluate the entire thing based on one year alone.
Just to add some random anecdotal thoughts to the 'teachers are freaking out' point.
I work in a school (UK) and it's obvious that something has changed with kids mental health - or possibly with their parents' assessment of it - in the last decade or so. The trend started before Covid and has significantly increased since. I don't have exact data but speaking from personal experience:
- We now get far more requests from parents in the run up to their child joining school that they
need to be in classes with friend X or away from enemy Y. They will offer letters from doctors saying that it's vital to their child's mental health. I'd say this has about doubled in 10 years.
- We have to make many times more accommodations to students for them to sit standardized tests, this has especially skyrocketed since Covid. The number who have some kind of significant mental health struggle with taking a 90 minute exam has gone from c2-3% 10 years ago to 15-20% now. 10 years ago it was very rare to have anyone in a cohort who was too mentally unwell to take any exams at all: last couple of years it's 1-2%. This is different from those who just can't be bothered to turn up, which has remained about constant.
- I see statistics that show no significant rise in suicides (here in UK at least), and that's a relief. But it definitely feels like there's been a rise in threats or talks about suicide. I've seen parents email in: 'my child says he'll kill himself unless he can give up <subject>'; 'every time she has a class with <teacher> she self harms afterwards: you need to do something'.
There used to be a semi-joking trope that when you asked a student to do anything they didn't want to they'd reply 'it's against my rights'. Now it would be (more likely from the parent) 'you're not meeting my/their needs'.
I think it's both that the mental health has suffered, and people have also realized that "mental health" are the magic words to force people to do what you want.
(This has, in turn, made genuine mental health worse as people "fake it until they make it".)
I appreciated this essay far more than any others I have read lately
FWIW - the difficulty of twins, relative to two small children of different ages, start to invert around 2 years. That is, I, as a two-under-two mom with a friend whose twins were the same age as my oldest, started to be envious of her situation when they were around 2 years old.
“ Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.”
One of the tricks is older siblings. Part B of this trick is living close to a house full of older cousins. The kids were sent outside in packs and the older siblings/cousins collectively had to “watch” them. This meant a range of things depending on those older siblings/cousins interests and ethics.
Not sure why the researchers haven’t looked at this. They may have forgotten or not known about it. It seems weird to people who didn’t experience it. Anecdata primarily from 1950s, bit from 1980s. I knew one older sibling doing tremendous daily babysitting for younger siblings in about 1990 due mainly to the death of their mother but this person was in an unusual situation at that point rather than it being the norm.
Stories about what the older kids made them do or let them do is a wilting genre. Some of those older cousins/siblings had a “high tolerance for physical risk” but I think less tolerance for disobedience. I didn’t read the recent NYT about how siblings “shape us” but I think there was a time when they ran the show away from home.
You may be able to recreate something like this with the house of rationalist “cousins” next door. Not sure.
Related: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/12/cousin-relationships-fertility-rate/676892/
I came to write a very similar comment.
"Older kids" is absolutely the trick in question, it's a big effect with my youngest & I can easily imagine a community of kids making it even more effective.
Book book book!
Agree with other commentators that a big part is just your kids are still young - I noticed a big shift in how fun things were at ~18 months, and once the 2nd got to 18 months and could play more cooperatively with the older one there was a huge shift in how easy things were ("huh you guys are just happily playing with each other...I guess I'll go clean the Kitchen? cool?")
The immune systems definitely make things a bit harder - part of what helps me wife out is she just has so many other mom groups she can hang out at where the kids run around and the moms talk with each other. This might be harder to find in SF though.
I think the dynamic of playing with each other also encourages more kids. It's fun to see how my two kids interact with each other and us. Once we have another kid the possible relationship graph to see will expand significantly more than 20%, and so on from there.
This book had a huge influence on me when we had our first kid 13 years ago. Well, maybe not so huge since we decided to stop at two. But, our reasons for that were more about being introverts than about kids being difficult (maybe having a house full of people when we need a disproportianate amount of alone time isn’t a good plan). I haven’t read the book for a long time, but it put me on the path to some other lessons that I thought might be worth sharing.
1. Enjoy your kids for who they are right now. A lot of parenting advice – society in general – is focused on making sure they “turn out ok.” Worrying too much about making “mistakes” sucks all the joy out of being a parent. Kids are funny and weird as well as high-maintenance. Remember to enjoy the good parts.
2. There’s a cottage industry of fear-mongering about the “critical 1-3 years.” So many of our peers believed they had one chance to get it right – and if you messed it up your kids were doomed for life. Outside of extremes of abuse or neglect (I’d also make special carve outs for extremely poor nutrition and the horrible “kid friendly” adware garbage on phones and tablets), I think most of those worries aren’t justified.
3. Many of our peers got into attachment parenting. I’m not going to open that cesspool debate, but I will say it’s a very high-impact way to parent that subverts almost everything in your life to ensure the kids don’t wind up like Romanian orphans. If you really love the idea of a family bed and breastfeeding until the kid decides they’re ready to stop, then go for it. But, the idea that NOT doing these things will result in developmental issues is just false. Do what works for your family.
4. We also knew a lot of parents who just assumed they would keep up with softball/rock climbing/“the band” – and are horrified when it just doesn’t work. I guess I am not sure what to say. Your life is going to change when you bring more people into it. There’s a fare amount of dragging them along with you that works (we bought a boat when both of our kids were still in diapers), but thinking your life isn’t going to change and then being shocked and disappointed when it does – and then bitching about it on social media – seems like a weird approach.
5. One day, my wife was standing in line at a coffee shop having a kind of soft-complaining conversations about all the things we were juggling. An older guy in line kind of smiled and shrugged and said, “don’t wish your life away.” We’ve tried to remember that every time things get hard.
I feel like an extremely effective charity from the viewpoint of pronatalism would be providing pro-bono legal services to parents who get in trouble due to letting their children play outside. I could not find any such organization that currently exists, and I’m not sure why not. The only reason I can think of is perhaps lawyers are wary of accidentally representing parents who are actually abusing their children, but I feel like you can just fire your client if that turns out to be the case.
RE: getting sick from daycare
I tended, past tense, towards getting very sick. Sending kids to daycare came with a real crappy intro period as I was constantly sick. But that also seems to have trained up my immune system and now I mostly just don't get sick anymore. Talk to anyone that works with kids and you'll hear a similar story.
I think a good argument against superstimuli when kids are younger is in this article: https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/hyperstimuli-are-understimulating.
Kids may less be able to tell that the superstimuli are actually understimulating, and make good choices in regards to that. More and more people I know are reevaluating their relationship with social media towards using it less.
I tend to think more and more that humans have good built-in systems to stop when they've reached some threshold of pleasure (like when eating steak, watching a movie, etc) but that as we discovered more and more stuff we discovered stuff that can bypass these systems on a few points.
It's like, when eating steaks you fill the "eating savory food" but also "having some micronutrients" and also other stuff. Doritos (to take the example from the article) may fill the "eating savory food" without the micronutrients so you're left wanting more.
Same for algorithmic content in the way "the algorithm" serves it to you, but also in the way it's made (lots of shorts are made to make you want more, and try to give a bit of fulfillment, but mostly make you want more, kind of like a bad mystery novel). Clickbait is like that too, it piques your curiosity in a way that's been optimized to go through your normal barriers. Lots of people are aware of clickbait, while still clicking each time.
There are also stuff that's so addictive we deny it even to adults (heroin for example), or that's heavily restricted (gambling) because we've known them for a while and know how the story goes. In fact lots of techniques to avoid spending too much time on social media/phones like leaving your phone outside your bedroom kind of looks like the restrictions we put on gambling (it may only be done in some specific places) and then when we remove those restrictions, lots of people have worse lives https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment.
>But if phones are merely very addictive - so addictive that college students scroll through social media instead of going to class - then it’s less obvious that it matters. You can’t realistically prevent your teenager from using a phone during college; if she has addictive tendencies, she’s going to get addicted. So why not save yourself some babysitting time when she’s three years old by letting her go on Toddler Instagram?
Maybe some way to approach it is, how would I deal with raising my kid in a country where opium is legal? Or, how did parents approach smoking when it was legal everywhere, if they didn't want their kids to smoke? Did the parents trying to prevent their kids from becoming addicted to smoking helped the kids live better lives?
I am nineteen (and grew up in a wealthy suburb in the US) so I think I probably have more anecdotes about growing up with or without screens than most commenters here.
I received a smartphone in fourth grade because I began to be expected to walk home from school with my sister (half a mile) by myself and text my mother (who was then working again) that I had made it home safely. However, this phone had very locked-down parental permissions, so I couldn't download any apps and it was not interesting to me until I was thirteen. At this time I was only allowed to spend ten minutes a day playing games on the computer.
In around third grade I received a chromebook to do my schoolwork. For reasons I can't remember, I wasn't very motivated to browse the internet by myself at this time. I do remember that many of my classmates were playing computer games and that my sister got in trouble with our parents for spending too much time reading the Minecraft wiki.
I was never allowed to watch TV of any kind, and only rarely allowed to watch child-appropriate movies. I believe that this may be the reason I still can't watch movies or TV. I struggle to understand what is going on in a scene visually, who is talking, etc, especially with animated movies or television. I do have sensory processing issues and this might be part of it.
At around thirteen I got a second chromebook for home use and ended up actually being online. I joined Tumblr at this time and made my first online friends. This made me more interested in my phone because I could message my online friends through the web. I also started taking pictures with my phone around this time (though I had a digital camera beforehand). I had some bad outcomes from this but I think they were almost entirely because my parents are kind of terrible. If they had treated me like a person who deserved respect I could have asked for help with those problems more often.
(Side note: your kids will almost certainly go on the internet and pursue interests you think are stupid. Commit to never ever making fun of their interests not even a little bit. The worst online-related experiences I've had were with not-quite-abusive-but-very-horrible online friendships and romantic relationships which I could not ever tell my parents about. I was certain they would have made fun of me instead of supporting me, or possibly have taken my internet access, because these relationships were built in the context of fandom and online roleplaying. You would like your children to be comfortable telling you that the person they write fanfiction / do Tiktok trends with is being unacceptably cruel to them.
You should also not make fun of things your children do on the internet, or if you must at least don't tell them you're doing it. When I was six and would say something that sounded silly to adult ears my mother would post it to Facebook immediately while laughing at me and despite the fact that now as an adult I'm sure it was in fact cute and silly, it made me feel very rejected because I was not joking.)
Many of my classmates in high school had younger siblings who they thought had unacceptable access to technology. A very common theme among my classmates when we had this discussion was "the medium amount of TV as a child and full internet access I had in middle school was fine for me and I turned out okay, but my nine-year-old brother is addicted to mobile games".
I really chafed against parental restrictions on my phone (though again, this is mostly because my parents are terrible and I had reasonable fear that they would mock me for wanting to do any given thing) but I definitely think that children younger than I don't know, about twelve, should not be able to download any app they want and *really* should not be able to pay for things on their phone. When you eventually give your kids a phone, double check this. Some of my classmates' younger siblings spent several hundred dollars on mobile games before their parents realized this had happened.
I wandered into whatever part of the internet gets me here, and Tumblr, and Tumblr was the way I learned I was transgender, so I guess in some sense you could attribute my gender to the internet but I definitely remember feeling intense physical dysphoria before I was online. I am also mentally ill but I remember being mentally ill before going online. I was raised in a liberal atheist family and have continued to be a liberal atheist. I mostly agree with my parents on politics except that I am pro-polyamory, think that I should be allowed to physically transition, and have more nuanced thoughts on mental illness and homeless people. I have just finished a successful freshman year as a college student.
I think if you want your kid to have reasonable opinions, being willing to have respectful debate with them and trying to see their perspective is important, and not making them afraid to tell you anything they are interested or thinking about is very important. (I cannot overstate how much of my bad relationship with my parents comes from them mocking me for my interests being childish. I think this is an underrated failure mode in parenting.)
On the whole, I think the appropriate age to be able to use a smartphone is probably around twelve or thirteen. (Possibly younger & with more locked-down permissions if you think it will be helpful to your kid to be able to call you-- maybe this has implications for free-range parenting.) Being allowed image- and video-based social media is worse than being allowed a web browser or to text friends or something. I nearly ended up using Instagram compulsively but I didn't have it until recently and I was able to conquer that partially because I knew I had more important things to do and partially because I was used to doing sliightly more intellectually stimulating things on my phone. Highly recommend trying to get your kid to read ebooks on their smartphone when they eventually get one-- when I end up doing something mindless on my phone, the majority of the time I default to "reread a book", which I think is straightforwardly better than having your default be social media.
> I was never allowed to watch TV of any kind, and only rarely allowed to watch child-appropriate movies. I believe that this may be the reason I still can't watch movies or TV. I struggle to understand what is going on in a scene visually, who is talking, etc, especially with animated movies or television. I do have sensory processing issues and this might be part of it.
Anecdata: I was also raised without TV, and I also have a difficult time watching movies and TV – I tend to find any unpleasant themes in video media way more emotionally intense than books about similar topics.
On Free range kids:
Anecdote, but this is one of those situations where neighborhood matters a lot. I live in an area that's primarily single family homes owned by people with kids and a tight knit community. The area is bounded on one side by a creek and the other by a parkway. With those barriers it's relatively easy to give my kids free range, knowing that there's a broad set of other parents out there and clear boundaries to stay within.
> Deaths from homicide are up slightly, but realistically it doesn’t matter given how rare homicides were to begin with (and most child homicide victims are unfortunately killed by family members).
one has to wonder whether the increased child homicide rate might be _because_ many children are now spending more time either at home or at the home of a relative, and hence closer to the very people they are at risk from.
Regarding smartphones, this recent firsthand writeup by a high school teacher was interesting because it is a before/after comparison: the school decided to flat-out ban student phones inside the building. They had some false starts on making that effective, but did finally get there starting with this school year.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-163007211
I haven't read this book, and I am jealous you have a nanny. That said, twins is definitely one of the hard modes of parenting, so you should NOT feel guilty about being overwhelmed. We have Irish twins, and having two small children whose nap schedules are not fully synchronized, who are not capable of playing with each other without accidentally maiming one another, who egg each other on with whining and jealousy, and who (as they get older) are capable of cooperation ONLY when it comes to pulling off intricate Ocean's Eleven-style heists* to get past security measures is a whole different ballgame than taking care of a 6-month-old while your 4-year-old looks at a picture book in another room.
Yes, you can relax and let them watch something pre-approved on Netflix for a while. Yes, if you ignore their whining they will eventually figure out how to entertain themselves with their own toys. But small children close together in age are hard to deal with.
*Seriously, now that they are 3 and 4, they can manage to have one child set up a distraction while the other one uses a broom to open a hook-and-eye latch at the top of a locked door.
I hear you. I have 7yo twins. When they were that age, they were insane. Just so exhausting. I spent 100% of my awake non-work time on childcare. My wife was full time mom and I don’t know how she survived. But now they are amazing! They will happily play on their own or read for a good chunk of the day.
Also, our subsequent kids (ages 2 and 4) have been way easier and more enjoyable because a) they came one at a time and b) the older twins help. For example, this morning I was up early with the insane 2yo, and couldn’t do anything but watch him. But my 7yo boy woke up and decided to just play with the 2yo for an hour while I worked out.
But yeah I would constantly read these statistics about parenting and searched frantically for what we were doing wrong. We weren’t doing anything wrong. Twin toddlers are just insane.
Our twins were in the NICU with a set of triplets so we got to know the parents. With twins, having two parents and two arms, etc. made is seem like a fair fight... whenever we were wiped out, I'd think about the triplets.
The flip side is that as a parent of twins I would often look at parents of singletons who complained of exhaustion and think, what do you even have to do?
^100% true^
It is wonderful to see the best book in the world reviewed by the best book reviewer in the world. This made me smile.
I have a question about the general sort of argument that Caplan is making. I haven't read his book, so if he answers it, just let me know! If not, I'm curious how people might address it.
The magic of science is that you can come up with reliable, often counterintuitive results through controlled processes. But they are *controlled* processes, which means that if you remove the controls you have to wonder if the results are still good. In this specific case:
Caplan (as I understand it) points to studies where parents did more or less active parenting and showed that it didn't make a difference, and more broadly to studies showing that parental involvement doesn't make a big difference in outcomes. But given how common beliefs in the other direction are, all of those studies were presumably done on parents who *thought* that what they were doing would make a big difference. And presumably this affected what they did—all of those who did less (and avoided bad outcomes) presumably worried and made sure they didn't go over the line to too much less, for instance. Which is to say, that it's entirely possible that the results Caplan points to *only* hold under the conditions that parents *don't* think they're true—that is, that parental outcomes don't make much difference *if* parents are convinced of the contrary!
Now, you might say that this is ridiculous and counterintuitive. But then, the idea *that parental involvement doesn't matter* is pretty counterintuitive for most people. We will believe it's true if there are studies showing it is true. But if those studies are done under a specific condition (parents believing the contrary), then can you extrapolate them without that condition?
I guess what I'm saying here is that once you're playing the science game, you can't really rely on intuition, "well of course THAT does/doesn't make a difference!". The power of science is its repeatability and reliability; but its specificity is its weakness. Either you are relying on studies in the face of general beliefs—in which case this *specific* issue, does parental involvement matter *if parents believe it doesn't*—hasn't been studied; or you are relying on your general sense of what is plausible, in which case of *course* parental involvement matters! I don't see how you can have it both ways.
FWIW, this is about half a real concern—I can imagine that parents who don't think parental involvement matters, or matters much, doing radically less and thereby going farther than any parent who thought it mattered did & achieving outcomes in ways that were not studied—and half a theoretical concern that seems to me to apply to a lot of social science in particular (in the hard sciences, the specific conditions come up more regularly, or can be made to, but in social sciences our beliefs & practices are influenced by the new ideas which means we are never working under the conditions that we've studied!)
I would love to hear what people think about this.
I find it sort of shocking that Kaplan admits to having nannies, when for this system to work, it must be workable for most people, who cannot afford nannies. Similarly with the ever-increasing cost of daycare.
On the stimulus question, I'll say (anecdotally and unscientifically) that I've found that having slightly luddite tendencies has been of the foundations of my intellectual development; I was the last person I knew to get a cellphone (not till college, when all my high school peers had them) and the last to get a smartphone (not until 5 years after college, in late 2016). Having a smartphone has absolutely reduced the amount I read books or do non-smartphone things with my downtime, even if I don't spend extensive time on it in one go. This is not self-congratulatory (clearly, I was just following my own weird predispositions) but I say this as distinct from saying "I don't find this technology addictive" - I absolutely do! I just view being addicted to it as very bad, and go out of my way to avoid it and judge myself for it, in the way that some people do for using heroin, and that conviction helps stave it off.
I think part of the underlying issue isn't just the addictiveness of the screens, but the *complete cultural normalcy* of that addictiveness - when a kid doesn't become a screen-addict, they are overtly cutting themselves off from their peers, something that no kid who isn't autistic wants to do.
Just a minor remark, the Roman Empire probably did not collapse in 476, that was just the date of another event in the really slow fade-away. Bret Devereaux (acoup.blog) has an excellent three-part series on it.
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/
Link for those curious
Very good, relatable post. Some quick thoughts:
1) I also worry about how much time we spend with our daughter, and am often overwhelmed. The exhaustion isn't from hard work, it's just that toddlers don't have any sense of restraint in demanding your attention and time. Fielding constant demands is tiring, even (especially?) from someone you like a lot and are inclined to accommodate.
2) I too intended to avoid being one of "those parents" and I absolutely am. There's so many fewer degrees of freedom on the parenting axis than it initially appears. Two-year-olds can't go outside and play for hours, and if they wanted to we have fewer kids available to play with than our parents.
I've seen suggestions that the secret to less parenting is group effort and community - kids run in packs and the parents do too, with one of the benefits being only one parent in the group needs to be "on duty" at a given time.
3) I do think our measures of happiness are super flawed. I'm not sure if parenthood produces more hedons than dolors or whatever. A lot of days I'm wiped and annoyed. But I'm certain that seeing the slimy potato I met a few years ago become a human being is a better kind of joy than sleeping in or eating a good cheeseburger. I don't think this is unique to childcare, but I do think it has its basis in productivity and social connection. In utility terms, I think maybe it's a feeling that's more consistently accessible or that I can be more confident is available in the future? Like if tomorrow my house burns down and my identity gets stolen, and I lose both my legs, a good cheeseburger won't cheer me up much, but I'll still have helped raise a kid.
4) I was very worried about screen addiction because I have an addictive personality (and a screen addiction tbh). My two-year-old is so stimulus sensitive that she avoids the TV on principle. She hates smartphone speakers. She'd prefer it if there were fewer trucks. And birds. I think personality is a bigger factor here than I initially gave credit for. But I will not be allowing social media until she's mid-teens at the earliest. I'm also trying to wind down my social media use in the face of *gestures broadly at the tech world right now.*
Excellent points, really well put. My experience absolutely backs up #2: being part of a group of adults all partially taking care of multiple toddlers is easier than the same amount of time solo-caring for a single toddler.
And I agree with 3: it would be good for society as a whole to think more in that direction. What you're describing, I definitely feel. You don't get nearly as many in-the-moment feelgood spikes you could get from living the childfree good life, but - higher baseline on the hedonic treadmill, I guess you'd call it?
I didn’t find the arguments in the book compelling. First of all, when you are spending hours and hours on childcare, it doesn’t feel that great to hear that it isn’t very important. But also, if you are arguing against common behavior there is a very large burden to overcome that the usual approach is right and you are wrong. It’s a wisdom of crowds thing. For example, kidnapping is rare, but kids used to walk to school by themselves and bike a lot by themselves. Kids getting hit by cars and bike accidents is still unlikely but the outcome is horrible that in expected value terms, coddling kids starts to make sense.
I think the book kind of clashes with free market mindset that people know what they are doing. If people are spending hours and hours with kids, there must be a reason for it. It would be like saying people are dumb to want nice houses and cars and things. Sure there are some academic studies that says time spent with kids isn’t that important, but by now we should know to put approximately zero trust in those results.
I certainly agree that there's no point rushing your kids to gymnastics classes they don't even like. But I have some arguments against the idea that parenting doesn't make much difference to later-life outcomes:
1. Opportunities are heavily mediated by parenting. If my parents chose to raise me in a less developed country, I would've had a very different life. If my parents not ensured that I had abundant access to books and the internet, we might not be having this discussion. If my parents did not ensure I socialized with other children often, I suspect that I would today be relatively less socially confident or capable. Additionally, I explicitly and consciously modeled a lot of my social behaviors after my parents—particularly my dad, who is a very charming person, and my mom, who is a very assertive and no-nonsense person. At the very least, most gymnastics champions had parents who brought them to gymnastics regularly and at a young age.
2. Health interventions have compounding effects. Because my parents were relatively understanding about mental health (especially for Asian parents) I went to therapy as a highschooler and got diagnosed with ADHD before starting college. Both of those events have had long-lasting effects on my life, and will continue to do so. You can imagine similar effects caused by vaccination, nutritional quality, avoiding toxic substances (like lead or maybe microplastics), etc.
3. I am a proponent of attachment styles as proposed by attachment theory, just from sheer personal experience (my priors on this are strong but not unbreakable). Speaking with my friends and partner and meeting their parents can explain a LOT of personality variation and how they go about handling their relationships, and this holds true even for people who are adopted (including my partner!) If nothing else, I believe that parental warmth and consistency is very important.
4. Parents can teach their children learnable skills. We know that there are learnable skills that can have long-lasting effects on people's quality of life: gratitude, emotional regulation via CBT, meditation, etc. I learned some of these from my parents. For example, my mother was big into meditation, and it has had a long-lasting effect on me. When meditation became a big thing in the West, I already had experience in some of the Eastern traditions and realized that I had a leg up because of it; I'd never known how much it improved my quality of life until I read about the supposed benefits and realized I already possessed many of them.
5. Traumatic experiences and abuse pretty undeniably shape people's futures. I suppose you could make the case that good parenting is thus avoiding particularly bad practices, and no "good" practices provide anything of worth. Even if that is the case, I would still consider that to be important.
Also, I recommend you read Stephanie H. Murray's Substack. She wrote a post a while back titled "Are We All Just Pretending to Be Helicopter Parents?" that seems relevant (https://stephaniehmurray.substack.com/p/are-we-all-just-pretending-to-be).
I'm consistently frustrated when it comes to these discussions of screen time for kids: why is it always framed as "I either give them unfettered access to the modern, attention sapping algo-monster, or nothing at all."
Parental controls are pretty good these days. And even if you don't trust them, then there's no reason you need to. You can easily lock down a tablet so all it has on it is Sesame Street and educational games. I realize this gets harder to enforce as the kids get older, but I'm always baffled when the screen time discussion assumes all activity on a screen is equally poisonous, as if LEDs magically rot your brain. Unlimited AI slop on YouTube Kids could certainly kill a kid's attention, but you can't convince me sitting them down with Breath of the Wild or Bluey for a couple of hours would have even close to the same effect.
If you're doing this kind of thing, you probably should include a notes app, a drawing app, some office software, a bunch of e-books you're ok with, any manuals which aren't relevant to breaking the parental controls, a bunch of inoffensive pretty pictures (maybe a folder of desktop wallpapers, maybe family photos, maybe Wikimedia Commons featured images), et cetera.
Nobody is worried about their kids spending too much time reading manuals or taking notes or playing around in PowerPoint, and these things can be fun if you are a bored child. I loved exploring the filesystem and using KidPix and GraphicConverter and making Office documents with five fonts and a bunch of colors and clipart when I was a kid.
As soon as our kids were able to understand the directive, the rule was always, you can have screens if you can stop using them when we ask you to without a tantrum. It worked well enough up to about 12. After that - I still confiscate the 14 year old's phone regularly.
I (born 1981, UK) was fairly free-range when I was a kid. I allowed my kids to be, and even did the thing of kicking them out of the house (we live in gated estates in China, so they can play inside the complex with no danger from cars). I was surprised by how little interest they had in being out. In retrospect, there are a couple of features of my childhood that encouraged me out of the house:
Dog - I was allowed to walk the dog solo from a pretty young age, and that was a treat.
Friends nearby that I could call on.
Living in apartments, I was never willing to get a dog. Just seemed cruel. And Chinese parents don't believe in play, only endless classes, so our kids would never be welcome in friends' homes.
So, it's not just whether you allow them out. It's whether you are able to create a life in which going and being outside would be an enticing thing to do.
I'm sorry you're finding it tiring... embrace the suck! Playing with small kids is genuinely tedious, but also profound and life-enhancing and builds a great and lasting bond. Do it as much as you can, know that it's enough, and be relaxed when you can't face it any more!
If you want to know what parents in the 60s did, why not read parenting books from the 60s?
I’d guess they just stuck the youngest ones in a crib or playpen and ignored them when they cried until they cried themselves out.
That would fit what I’ve heard about strict feeding schedules, not picking them up too much, etc.
I thought the same thing. My parents were both young children/born in the 60s and the sense I have from their stories is they were just kind of left to their own devices and not in a good way.
To the extent that I can recall my childhood in the late 1960s, yeah, that's about right.
In particular the parenting books, or book singular. My mother was the youngest sibling in a large family, so had little experience looking after younger children. Or in how a more typical 2.3-child family would operate. By her own account, she read Spock(*), said "that sounds right; I'll just do that", and basically did just that.
My brother and I turned out reasonably well, so that's probably where I'd start if I were raising kids.
* The other Spock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Common_Sense_Book_of_Baby_and_Child_Care
It gets better at 2, and much better at 3, but yeah, the first few years do kinda suck, or at least, they suck up a lot of time (babies are still adorable!).
The first paragraph is why I didn't read past the title! 🤣
Bryan Caplan's wife only spent one hour a day on childcare when their kids were toddlers??
Hired nannies and helpful relatives are noted, but that still seems really low.
That's not too far from where I am at this point, so can't throw stones. Toddlers are really really exhausting.
That seems to be Caplan's report, and I imagine his wife might have a different recollection. If Caplan is counting only 'direct interaction' such as "physically fed the child" that might be reducing it way down to "one hour a day" (e.g. maybe the nanny fed the child, changed nappies) but unless Mrs. Caplan was outside the house at a day job all day, she would still have had interaction with the young children more than that.
Well, that or they emulated 19th to early 20th century upper-middle to upper class English childrearing practices.
From Hilaire Belloc's "Talking (and Singing) of the Nordic Man":
"The Nordic Man is born either in the West End of London or in a pleasant country house, standing in its own park-like grounds. That is the general rule; he is, however, sometimes born in a parsonage and rather more frequently in a Deanery or a Bishop’s Palace, or a Canon’s house in a Close. Some of this type have been born in North Oxford; but none (that I can discover) in the provincial manufacturing towns, and certainly none east of Charing Cross or south of the river.
The Nordic Man has a nurse to look after him while he is a baby, and she has another domestic at her service. He has a night and a day nursery, and he is full of amusing little tricks which endear him to his parents as he grows through babyhood to childhood.
Towards the age of ten or eleven, the Nordic Man goes to a preparatory school, the headmaster of which is greatly trusted by the Nordic Man’s parents, especially by the Nordic Man’s mother. He early learns to Play the Game, and is also grounded in the elements of Good Form, possibly the Classics and even, exceptionally, some modern tongue. He plays football and cricket; usually, but not always, he is taught to swim.
Thence the Nordic Man proceeds to what is called a Public School, where he stays till he is about eighteen. He then goes either to Oxford or Cambridge, or into the Army. He does not stay long in the Army; while from the University he proceeds either to a profession (such as the Bar, or writing advertisements) or to residence upon his estate. This last he can only do if his father dies early."
Given that your solution was to get help from other adults, did you find any data on how help from relatives/the village has changed?
I admit I didn't look too hard for that data.
I'm sure that you asked _your_ parents for advice/anecdotes, and am somewhat surprised that this didn't come up in the post.
Two more reasons college students might not be able to read-- this is from stuff I've read rather than experienced, so you're taking your chances.
30 years of whole language teaching which was telling children to look at the first letter and guess at the word.
More recently, a teaching style which demanded extreme accuracy in reading paragraphs, but never taught whole narratives or encouraged any sort of immersion.
I note that these are somewhat opposite to each other-- a child exposed to the first couldn't function at all with the second.
I don't think whole language teaching is the problem, because many of the stories I hear are at top colleges, and I assume at top colleges everyone can do the very basic word-identification task that whole language and phonics compete to help with.
I think you mixed up whole word reading with whole global narrative reading (which isn't an academic term I think) that this commenter is describing
No, Nancy said "whole language teaching which was telling children to look at the first letter and guess at the word."
Fair enough, reading it back again it's kinda incoherent as a point...
I actually think the biggest hack is having your children do labor. We're terrified of "parentification" today, but kids want to be helpful, and they want to play with other kids. Have them be helpful, at least to the point that they are "net neutral" to household tidying, as soon as possible. And if you have a whole mess of kids close together in age, they will want to play with each other as much as (or more) than play with you.
It genuinely works, so long as you don't try to hold yourself to the same standards as people over-parenting one child. You take the kids to the park and let them play, and then you just accept you might get a nasty look from another parent every once in a while, if you misplace a kid or if that parent feels like they need to help your child on a ladder (that they already know how to climb).
Kids don't want to be responsible for the behavior of other kids if not given tools to control that behavior. If you want a kid to supervise a sibling, you need to be ready for them to run to you about any issues, or delegate them some kind of authority, and if you don't do any of that, they might make their own tools through means like hitting.
I really just care that they are responsible for telling me if someone is doing something unsafe. Otherwise, I just want them to play together.
Tbh, if I am not around, I don't really care that much how they resolve issues. We teach them not to hit or be physical and to use words, and while I think there is probably a little shoving or shouting from time to time, it honestly doesn't come up that much. I can 90%+ of the time get a good 30-45 minutes to do a workout while they play together in the basement or watch a show.
And rightly or wrongly, having this philosophy allows me to reframe my self-oriented workout time as "good parenting" :)
It is probably true that you can't make your child happy. But I think it is certainly true that you can make your child miserable.
Move out of the stupid city and, when they are old enough, kick your kids outside for at least an hour a day. Its not a choice between parenting and phones, its a choice between maintaining your pre-kid lifestyle, and adjusting to meeting the needs of the entire family.
Your argument about the fall of Rome being associated with technological advancement doesn't make much sense. You would need to draw a line that there were specific technologies that were not inherited in the subsequent societies and that people were decrying those technologies as harmful prior to the fall. That seems like quite a tall task
I don't think I claimed that the fall of Rome was associated with technological advancement. I was using it as a metaphor for things that don't happen for a long time, then do happen.
Then it seems like kinda a pointless straw man because I don't think people making the argument that cell phones and social media are having similar impacts to books and writing are saying that something is not happening indefinitely.
I'd say people are making the argument that if you want to say there's something specially bad about technology, you need to draw a better line than a corruption of the youth or of the common man.
I recall having a conversation with a classmate a while back. We were talking about having children and he said that he was somewhat worried about ever becoming a parent: what if his child would grow up to be some kind of terrible person, for example the kind of person who thinks that poverty is the fault of poor people?
Being interested in GiveDirectly's work, I'm very far from victim-blaming poor people myself. But I remember feeling... annoyed? saddened? by this phrase. It felt very wrong. There are so many terrible things that could happen to someone as they grow, I thought — they could become a murderer, for instance. But your worry is about your child's political opinions, likely because it's the kind of people who hurt you especially on the internet. (We had not discussed politics before; it was only at that moment that I guessed his politics was left-leaning and the blaming-poor-people thing must be from some social media and [understandably] painful for him.)
I wanted to explain that the way to resolve those differences would be to talk to his child and explain to them why your opinion differs, genuinely hear them out and learn why they think what they think, and try to figure out the truth together. That on the internet, in the constant stream of nonsense, we dismiss people on the other side of the screen at a hair trigger at it, and makes sense in the context, but with your child, the context is different and they are to be perceived as a human being no matter what. And that, at any rate, the way to gain epistemological trust would be to be open to opinions, ready to share his, and prepared to figure things out together, and not to shove any truths down his child's throat.
I tried to explain some of it, a small part, but I do not feel like I did a good job.
***
I feel like this it's easier for me than for some others. I have friends from very different parts of the political spectrum, some of them would probably hate each other. Since I don't belong anywhere on that spectrum — since I don't belong with any political ideology so far — I'm free to perceive them as human beings with their sadnesses and their own kind of striving for goodness.
Still, even taking that into account, it's sad for me to see the mention of mind viruses. What if your daughter will be SJW with 7 genders? You'll have the most interesting conversations! You'll explain to her why there are obviously 9 genders (or whatever Obviously Correct Number of Genders is currently accepted). Maybe sometimes she'll think you're silly and a little old-fashioned. Okay.
What if your son will share some bitter, hateful ideology? You'll try to give him reasons not to be bitter about people, and not to hate them. Maybe you'll succeed, and maybe not. That's the case for every human being, and theirs is the road.
Good post.
I have a thread on the Dotti-Sani and Treas result. TL;DR: Not credible. You can read that here: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1829621751476539709
Regarding test score changes between birth cohorts, the issue with them is generally much more about measurement non-invariance than demographic change. I suspect that holds true for the vast majority of these sorts of comparisons and that changes usually reflect differences in test-related knowledge, test-taking methods, and so on, rather than shifts in underlying ability.
The population just isn't super malleable, so large, real shifts seems unrealistic to me, and when the data is there to analyze appropriately, measurement non-invariance tends to be the dominant reason for changes.
Can you explain the difference between test-related knowledge and underlying ability (I understand we're not talking about IQ changes, but does this rule out that kids are too phone-addicted to study and so don't have as much test-related knowledge?)
Sure!
Underlying ability is raw smarts, intelligence, what the tests are supposed to measure.
Test-related knowledge is something required for the the test to showcase your underlying ability. For example, a reading comprehension test will not showcase the underlying ability of individuals who were never taught to read. We have an empirical example of exactly this limiting factor masking the intelligence of a pair of separated-at-birth twins in 20th-century England: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1818894384198279369
There are plenty of other examples like this too. For example, if you randomly selected some people in a group to teach matrix rules and then administer a battery of tests including matrix tests to the whole group, the ones who received the training will appear to do much better. This will be for reasons we can ascertain are due to the bias induced by having different test-related knowledge conditional on a given level of underlying ability, as we've experimentally altered the levels of test-related knowledge without respect to ability.
What I've found does not rule out that the cause of the changes in test-related knowledge are things like phones, failures to study, etc. They absolutely could be, and that test-related knowledge could be very important for later life outcomes, too, even if those deficits don't come with deficits in underlying ability (although in every case where I have data to test, test-related knowledge doesn't have independent predictive power).
I know that all children are different, and my children aren't twins (I have two, spaced 20 months apart), also I've probably got lucky with my children's temperament but I think the closest I have to "one weird trick to make parenting easier" is to just do the jobs you have to do anyway, but with kids.
Going to the supermarket with kids is barely harder than going to the supermarket without kids. Whereas sitting down and reading a book near your kids is _much_ harder than sitting down and reading out of sight of children.
If you don't have jobs that need doing, putting them somewhere pretty babyproof, and keeping an ear out has worked well. Our eldest was very good at beating babyproofing, but there are systems you can get the require a magnet to unlock, and you can keep the magnet somewhere high up.
Regarding studies on the evolution of time spent by parents caring for children from the 1960s to today, I find it hard to believe that one could produce something truly reliable on this subject.
That being said, it's always better to rely on studies rather than nothing, and I don't doubt that we spend more time with children today. The reason seems obvious to me: the status of children has evolved significantly since ancient times and even since the 1960s. They are increasingly considered as full-fledged individuals. Society places much more importance on children. Laws and jurisprudence have also evolved in this direction.
This evolution has many factors but comes particularly from the fact that infant mortality was very high in the past. Children were half-alive beings. Death hovered above them like a Damocles sword. One shouldn't become too attached because what the Lord had given, he could take back. I believe that among the Romans, children weren't even given an official name until they had survived their first few years. [Edit: Overstatement. Nine days for males. But infant mortality there was a slow and progressive recognition as a person or citizen across years.].
It seems to me that if we allow children to wander less freely, or if we not only put seatbelts on them but also install them in secured seats, it's exactly for this reason. In the past, risk tolerance was much higher since, generally speaking, everything was riskier. Mortality was much higher at all ages, particularly in childhood, and this across all causes. "Women and children first" at one time apparently meant they should face death first (and not be rescued first). [Edit : sorry it appears to be a false debunking]
There is indeed a certain chicken-and-egg paradox, but I still think that the decrease in mortality thanks to hygiene, nutrition, and medicine has caused a paradigm shift where an adult's life has become more precious than before, and a child's life even more so.
But personally, if I spend time with my children, even if it's sometimes difficult, it's because I'm very interested in them. Everyone sets their priorities where they wish, but I find this to be a very good reason to devote time to them.
Moreover, I haven't read the book, but I find it hard to accept the idea that there would be no long-term benefit to all this attention given, this time spent, this care provided. I maintain the hope of making my children better people thanks to what I will have given them, and I'm speaking here especially about intellectual and moral values more than anything else. Success in material matters comes second.
"Women and children first" at one time apparently meant they should face death first (and not be rescued first)."
I must look that up, because on the face of it, it sounds like one of those popular debunkings which are in fact incorrect and the original meaning is the right one.
"I believe that among the Romans, children weren't even given an official name until they had survived their first few years."
That's another one I had to look up; I have a vague recollection that it differed in different cultures (e.g. in China children had a 'milk name' for early years before getting an official name). Best I can find on short notice is Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_naming_conventions
"The praenomen was a true personal name, chosen by a child's parents, and bestowed on the dies lustricus, or "day of lustration", a ritual purification performed on the eighth day after the birth of a girl, or the ninth day after the birth of a boy.
The nomen gentilicium (or simply nomen) was a hereditary name borne by the peoples of Roman Italy and later by the citizens of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. It was originally the name of one's gens (family or clan) by patrilineal descent. However, as Rome expanded its frontiers and non-Roman peoples were progressively granted citizenship and concomitant nomen, the latter lost its value in indicating patrilineal ancestry.
For men, the nomen was the middle of the tria nomina ("three names"), after the praenomen and before the cognomen. For women, the nomen was often the only name used until the late Republic. For example, three members of gens Julia were Gaius Julius Caesar and his sisters Julia Major and Julia Minor ("Julia the elder" and "Julia the younger").
A cognomen was the third name of a citizen of ancient Rome, under Roman naming conventions. Initially, it was a nickname, but lost that purpose when it became hereditary. Hereditary cognomina were used to augment the second name, the nomen gentilicium (the family name, or clan name), in order to identify a particular branch within a family or family within a clan."
So nothing there about waiting "years" to give the child a name. However, full legal recognition took place over such a period. Fuller treatment here:
https://www.vindolanda.com/blog/roman-women-and-children-part-4
"In ancient Rome, babies weren’t considered fully human upon birth. They gained humanity over time until they could walk and talk, the process beginning with their naming a few days after birth, and later when they cut teeth and could eat solid food.
...Once a child reached its first birthday it could have legal privileges and the parents could apply for it to have full Roman citizenship. Three years was viewed as the threshold to the next stage, but we would have been surprised at what was expected from children in the lower social classes even before such a tender age. Epitaphs and reliefs on graves show tiny children at work in mines or laundries, and some children could already have been practising spinning techniques as toddlers."
Thanks for the checking. I should have done it before posting. Sorry for that. The first seems indeed a false debunking, and the second an overstatement.
However, on the substance, it's a fact that children have traditionally had a status very different from what it has recently become.
>What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds? They can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they? Or maybe everyone else’s one-year-olds can, and mine can’t?
I think having the baby in a safe area where you don't need to constantly watch them would count. E.g., you're in the kitchen making lunch but you can see into the living room where the baby is playing, and you can periodically look up and make sure she's not escaping. Or you're doing something on your laptop while they're just playing around your ankles and not being too disruptive.
I have definitely considered these things, but it's a hard problem. If I try to restrict my children in a safe area while I go somewhere else, they bang on the gate and scream until I let them out. If I try to use a laptop while they play at my ankles, they climb up me and try to grab the laptop and bang on the keys.
Every time I sit down to write at my computer within 60 seconds my 3 year old will start climbing on the back of my chair, then situate herself on my shoulders. Followed by my 6 year old who will now remember the computer exists and ask if we can play Minecraft together.
It's frustrating, but at the same time isn't it great to be so loved?
I actually believe that "the kids are not what they used to" - for several generation.
I am stronger than my kids, my father stronger than me and my grandfather stronger than him.
It is even in Jewish tradition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeridat_ha-dorot
Yes, but think of how good our kids will be at kabbalah!
I wrote down some reflections on the phone/superstimulus question a while ago. I agree it's lazy to resolve it by saying it must be like previous moral panics, but I'm not sold it's as bad as many say.
https://www.the100.ci/2024/12/10/the-hare-brained-generation-teen-mental-health-crisis-or-lacklustre-record-keeping/
Also, Calvin preferred spending time in front of the TV and was often kicked out by his mom. I think learning impulse control and learning to like more refined things is one of the things we do as kids (and some do it better than others). Parents impose some consistent structure until this happens and then kids can learn within those constraints. You don't have to ban table time, but you can keep to a rule of only three jumps etc.
Thanks. I agree the positive evidence for mental health effects is weak (although I also don't think there's strong negative evidence).
Screen time and attention problems confounded by genetics, possibly no link
In this cohort study of 4262 pediatric participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, genetic confounding accounted for much of the association between screen time and attention problems and part of the association with internalizing problems in the model using molecular-based heritability. In models using twin-based heritability, genetic confounding fully explained both associations.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10628728/
I grew up mostly in a fairly primitive area, and yes: parenting was extremely minimal compared to how it is here, but I don't think you can replicate the effect.
We didn't have screens because there was one phone within 4 hours walking distance, so we would wake up, eat, there would our would not be some mandatory chores (clean the floor, husk the rice in the pillon, pic through beans, feed the chickens, all the various agricultural tasks that don't exist here), and then it was time to fuck off into the forest or the town square for the rest of the day.
We could come back for lunch (which was what was left of yesterday's dinner) as we pleased, but if you showed up to anybodies house they would probably feed you, we had to put in our hours in school but it was all grades at once in a two room building, so it was very short (though those who were interested started learning some pretty hard math at seven or eight because that's what the seventeen or eighteen year olds were doing), and we had to put in our time with god on sunday, even if anyone under the age of 40 being sincerely passionate about religion was looked on as a sort of semi-mental illness.
Didn't you have better things to do? Church for 20 year olds is for suffering in, not having spiritual experiences. That something those weird evangelicals who live in the commune on the mountain do.
Finally, after a long day of climbing trees and shrimping and carving elaborate tracks in cliff sides for hot wheels and getting into mild fistfights over perceived sportsmanship violations, you would come back for dinner, get mildly reprimanded if you got too dirty, do evening chores, then go to sleep.
I don't see how an American who doesn't live well and truly in the sticks could replicate this effect. Where would you even go to find a creek you could shrimp in that wasn't full of glyphosate?
I actually Laughed out loud when I got to the end of your free range kids letter:
"PS: We are rich and extremely litigious."
Love the idea of bright orange shirts, it is shocking even in a 'good' neighborhood how many people will complain that you let your kids have some independent freedom.
My wife asks me almost every day "what are we doing wrong?" We have a one-year-old in daycare and we both work full time. It is exhausting and it is easy to feel like other parents have some shortcut we don't know about when they're still alive after having a kid or two or three. Thank you very much for sharing that you're exhausted too!
For us, our kids didn't come pre-loaded with any useful software. The final features we needed for a minimum viable product didn't arrive on OTA updates until around 5 years old. Those first few years are tough, but once you download "feeds itself", "dresses itself", and "potty training" (for us it was about 6 months after, when they didn't need to carry around extra pants/undies/socks for frequent accidents) the stress levels go down a LOT. When you don't have to bring a stroller and a bag everywhere, you can go places so much easier.
Later, when you have one old enough to babysit (built-in childcare) your relationship with your spouse becomes more spontaneous again. In the meantime, I strongly recommend creating a date night routine that's sacrosanct and using flowers for spontaneity. We offset childcare costs during this period by partnering with another couple, whose date night sanctity we defended/supported as strongly as our own.
It doesn't have to suck, but this situation isn't the new normal forever. It'll pass.
Thanks for this!
Most families with three kids don't have both parents working full-time.
You're not doing anything wrong. One is just the hardest age - they're mobile enough to break things and hurt themselves without constant supervision, they have short attention spans, they're bad sleepers, they teethe and cry and they can't be told or taught anything. All of that changes sometime between 2 and 3 and it feels like waking up from a strange dream. Then it just gets easier and more fun from there (in my experience).
Thank you!
My dad, who grew up in semi-rural Mexico, likes to say they raised kids “like cattle” out there
We like the free range parenting laws in our state. Still, I sometimes get parents bringing my child home because he was running about "unsupervised". When I was a kid, most of my play was unsupervised and unstructured! That didn't mean I couldn't get ahold of my parents when I needed to, just that I mostly didn't need to.
One problem with outside play is that there aren't as many kids out there to play with. Maybe this is partly because people are having fewer kids. Maybe it's partly because those kids are on a screen, instead of outside. Maybe I just need to force the kids outside more to make it happen?
Last week we noticed the kids were getting a bit more rude/intolerant of one another. So we pulled screens for a week. After some initial grumbling (short-lived after we told them we were thinking of a two-week abstention, but we'd see whether one week was enough), the result was they were nicer, played outside more, and explored the neighborhood. Two of them discovered they could run to Target and play video games there, but honestly I'm not too worried about that. (Because they couldn't save on the demos, they talked about games they wanted - or no longer wanted - to buy, so Target's strategy seems to have worked there.) The next day they found something else to do.
They like it outside. They like playing Legos. They draw more, and my 12yo decided to try his hand at writing a novel. I hear you thinking, "Sounds like the simpler solution is to give them less screen time in general. If they're doing so much more with no screen time, surely your problem isn't that you're giving them any screen time, it's just that you've been giving them too much!"
Maybe? They normally get 1-2 hours a day, except nothing on Thursdays or Sundays, or any other day that it's not convenient, or when they don't do their chores. So normally they get 1-2 hours 3 days a week. Definitely <10 hours/week. So why the big change between some and no screen time? I think it's because when they're not on screens they're often thinking about or focused on them. If we give the kids too much time on screens, their behavior suffers and we have to take a trip to the park, or go on a hike or something active.
I wonder if part of the "soccer mom" over scheduling phenomenon is parents trying to get their kids to normalize post screen time withdrawals? The team sport is needed to balance the alone time with the screen. Dump the screen and maybe they'll play in the woods all in their own.
Most of this applies to older kids and not one year olds. When my kids were <5yo, we taught them to just be bored sometimes. It's a skill they should learn. Maybe in the era of smartphones it's obsolete, like learning cursive. But it probably won't hurt them to learn it anyway.
The discussion of screens seems to suffer from some black and white thinking, where the only options are no screens, or giving a kid full access to everything a phone can provide, including all the brain rot algorithm stuff. This is a false dilemma. It is quite possible to park your kid in front of a screen while you do something, while occasionally monitoring them to make sure they don't get into anything stupid.
My 2-year old watches a lot of TV. Often she watches enough of it that she gets bored and plays while it's on, I try to let her watch it a lot so she considers it something normal and not something special that she needs to make extra effort to seek out. I let her put in requests, but try to limit her to things that I don't think are algorithmic brain rot. She watches a lot of Bluey, Sesame Street, Pokemon, and 1930s Disney cartoons. The only YouTube she's allowed is old Sesame Street episodes and Ms Rachel.
I also have a tablet I let her play with. PBS kids has an app with lots of educational games she can play. She is not allowed any dumb freemium games. The tablet is also useful if she wants to watch Bluey right now, but my wife and I are using the main TV. I tend to keep the tablet half charged so that the battery life will stop her from playing on it too much.
This works well. I can get stuff done while she is distracted, but don't have to worry too much about her brain rotting. I do have to monitor her a little to make sure the screen stays on something worthwhile, but mostly it's fine. She's learned a lot from what she watches, I am constantly amazed when she knows a word my wife and I don't remember using or reading to her.
I actually did get my hands on a copy of changing rhythms of American family Life for just this! I can confirm that they only counted focused/primary child care as child care, so cooking while keeping an ear on the kids did not count. The craziest thing is that women 50 years ago spent 30 plus hours a week on housework like cooking and cleaning! Now that everybody is working, married women spend the same time on housework as single moms, which is about half as much as before.
https://joyfulparentingsf.com/p/working-moms-today-spend-as-much
For me the best ways to do child care as a secondary activity or in a less overwhelming way is to build or bring them to an enclosed space where they can do pretty much whatever they want relatively safely, like a playground or something. And I also try to be selective about when I intervene (e.g. hitting, and even then depending on the age of the child I might instruct instead of stepping in physically, like an older child has the ability to catch a younger child's hand and prevent hitting). Often they can figure out conflicts themselves. I wish that there were more spaces built like this, for adults to do childcare as a secondary activity so that we can hang with our friends or get some work done while with the kids. Play area in a restaurant, Wi-Fi at the playground, etc.
Here's what I've written about how I take care of multiple kids https://joyfulparentingsf.com/p/outnumbered-how-to-parent-multiple
I have 2 problems with Caplan's take:
1. It clearly presupposes parents are wealthy. "Hire more nannies" is not useful advice for those of us who are too poor to hire one nanny.
2. Caplan (and Scott) have failed to consider the risk of having a profoundly disabled child. Depending on the nature of the disability, this could prove financially ruinous or worse for the family. I know a family who has a son with severe autism. He's nonverbal, weighs close to 300 lbs, and is prone to unpredictable fits of violence. He must be supervised at all times and he's repeatedly injured his mother and little sister. Putting him in a group home is prohibitively expensive. He has absolutely ruined his parents' lives and there is a nonzero chance he will someday kill or permanently disable is little sister.
"Caplan (and Scott) have failed to consider the risk of having a profoundly disabled child."
Have they tried to give the kid up? Know in some states you can abandon babies at the firehouse no-questions-asked. I know it's a horrible thing to say but it's a horrible situation.
Their son is probably 18 or 19 at this point. He was entering puberty before they fully appreciated how difficult raising and supporting him would be. Even if they could bring themselves to give him up at that age, I'm not sure there are avenues to do so with a child that old. I know at one point they spent a small fortune ($60k iirc) just to get him in an assisted living situation for a few months so they could have a break. If there were more sustainable options, I think they would have exercised them by now.
That's just one example, I know other people who have children with serious, intractable behavior problems and it makes their lives suck. It's like being held hostage by someone you must also nuture and support.
Whatever happened to the anti-television movement? I'm slightly older than Scott but when I was a kid in the mid-80s there were still households where the parents had no TV and forbade their children from watching TV at other kids' houses, and this was seen as only a little eccentric. Culturally, opposition to TV as a crude, harmful and/or addictive activity seemed to have been very common in the 70s. I've heard lyrics criticizing TV by Zappa, Phil Collins, and The Tubes did a whole concept album on it, and the lyrics of all those songs read as if there was widespread agreement excessive TV watching is weird and unhealthy. One of the horrible vices ascribed to the children in Willy Wonka is that he watches TV too much.
What if they were right then and are still right? If you believed that TV was harmful in the 70s, what data has come in since the 70s that would've changed your mind? Culture HAS been degraded, there WAS a race to the bottom culminating in reality TV, people DID get addicted to it to the point that streaming services readily exploit them with endless serialized schlock, people read less, have worse attention spans, it pretty much all happened. It seems like the resistance died out from people just giving up rather than any rational reason to abandon their criticisms.
When I was a kid in the 2000s there were still households (like mine) where the parents had no TV and we didn't seem to end up watching TV at other people's houses (though it did occasionally come up in school).
We have no TV in our house (my wife and I are both Internet addicts but have no interest in television) and are strongly considering just not getting one and hoping our kids don't notice or care. Probably still won't help unless we also put our foot down with phones/computers.
A middle ground I think you should consider is "only tablets/computers, no phones". A laptop is much less easy to use on the go than a phone, so it doesn't reduce the risk of screen addiction of the "stay sitting around at home all day" variety, but it does drastically reduce the tendency to 'corrupt' touch-grass activities with additional Internet time on the sly. You're doing one thing *or* the other. I do this myself (I have a brick phone with ~no Internet access, and a laptop, but no smart phone) and I think it's worked wonders for my focus.
It's amusing that smartphones were my "kids these days" moment. I viscerally hate the experience of using them, small screens that are extremely inconvenient as either input or output device, tightly locked up app-store environment that hobbles your customization options at every turn, etc. Of course, the usefulness of always having a camera and being online is not to be denied, so I make do, but they definitely don't tempt me beyond the utility of mp3 player/e-book/watch in one device.
I’m still not completely convinced by the behavioral genetics argument. It often uses a heritability estimate—that is, the share of total phenotypic variation (genetic + environmental) attributed to genetics. If one assumes that genetic differences stay roughly constant while environmental influences decrease over time, it makes sense that heritability estimates would increase.
Applied here, time spent with your kids could, for example, affect their risk of developing depression. Neglecting them completely—spending zero time versus one hour per day—could clearly matter. But if you assume that after reaching some minimum threshold (say, one hour daily) additional time adds little benefit, and today’s parents on average exceed that threshold by far, it follows that we won’t observe a large parenting effect in the data (because we have little variance in the critical range where it would make a difference).
I agree with this, I just don't think the average neurotic parent is likely to go beneath whatever the (apparently rare in our society) threshold is.
Re parenting time:
I think the survey splitting parenting time into primary and secondary is insufficiently granular.
I would split parenting time into four categories along two axes. First being active versus on-call (which are primary and secondary in the jargon of the surveys you cite), and the just as important second being work versus play.
Active work parenting is all the worst parts of parenting. It’s the midnight hours you spend trying to rock a capricious infant back to sleep. It’s the hour you spend in the morning changing your toddler’s diaper, getting her dressed, feeding her breakfast as she fights every bite, and driving her to daycare in a rush to get her there in time for you to get to work. But it’s also things you do for your child when they’re in someone else’s care, such as washing bottles, preparing meals, emptying diaper pails, and washing baby clothes.
Active play parenting is all the best parts of parenting. Reading books to a baby who is pleased as punch to see you and hear your voice. Playing peekaboo. In brief, any time you’re doing an activity with your child, and you’re both smiling.
The defining feature of on-call parenting is that you can only do things that are within earshot of your child, appropriate to do around them, and can drop on a dime to attend to your child at need. This is why I think calling it ‘secondary’ parenting is a misnomer. What you are doing is still defined and limited by your parenting responsibilities, and will not be nearly as efficient as it would be if someone else was responsible.
On-call play parenting doesn’t exist for every parent, because the leisure activities you prefer might not be an option while a baby is napping within earshot.
And on-call work parenting is functionally the same as active work, with the only difference being that you’re doing work that you would have to do whether or not you had a child.
How much time you spend on each of these, and how stressful they are, varies so widely that I have no hope that any survey could adequately measure them, but acknowledging the differences between them is a bare minimum starting point.
Re safety:
First, a 1/70,000 per year risk is not a 1/7000 per decade risk.
Second, I think there’s something to be said for the effects of urbanization and atomization on crime risk. People have more neighbors than they ever have, and are less familiar with them.
What percentage of nuclear families in 2025 know the names of everyone living within .25/.5/1/5 miles of them? How does that compare with 1960?
Re we live in a societyTM:
There are two ways that free range parenting is made difficult/impossible by the culture in which I, and presumably you live.
The first you’ve discussed, but I want to expand on. The threat of legal harassment from police/busybodies who think that what you’re doing is wrong/dangerous/illegal is enough to discourage most people from deviating from the norm. But if you’re in the middle of a custody battle with the other parent, you have to be even more on your guard.
The second is socialization. Kids need peers their own ages to develop with, and unless you can get a whole group of parents on board with your ‘turn back the clock, free range kids’ initiative, your kid is going to be the loser who plays in the woods while everyone else socializes through screens.
Also: I really hate when people say 'every generation thinks that the newfangled thing is wrong, and ruining children, and they've always been wrong'.
Because A: it's false, and B: it wouldn't be a great argument if it was true.
There were all kinds of newfangled things that *did* have terrible consequences that the stodgy old folks warned about. The sexual revolution caused the AIDS pandemic. The pro-drug movement caused the fentanyl crisis.
Even if you dismiss those, and all other examples, and the old folks have never been right once in history, that should lower your prior, but not all the way to zero.
Remember, the powered flight skeptics had literally millennia of being right before suddenly becoming *very wrong*.
> The pro-drug movement caused the fentanyl crisis.
Actually, it was the crackdown on (safe, legal) oxies that doctors legally prescribed in great numbers, addicting many, which cracking down led to a huge bump in heroin shipments after the oxies were taken away but people were still addicted.
https://imgur.com/a/A94iUMr
So they cracked down on the heroin shipments, and lo and behold, it was found that fentanyl gets you the same amount of saleable opiate in 1/100 the space for 1/10 the price, after which all drug importers at every level in the US switched to fentanyl, because their interdictions went way down and their profit margins way up.
https://imgur.com/a/IfpEqp4
China vastly increased production and shipments of fentanyl, in a more or less poetic "Opium War" reversal:
https://imgur.com/a/5t4PRx5
I had all these at hand, because I wrote a post about this a while ago.
Excellent comment re: the distinction between work-parenting and play-parenting.
Virtually all parents in the 70’s to mid 80’a told their kids to be home at dinner time and not bother them.
No parent has a responsibility to entertain their child. That’s what TV has created IMHO. Not Internet, perpetual entertainment.
There is quite a lot of academic literature arguing that phones don't harm kids, most of which seems to be totally ignored by the academia-adjacent popularizers (e.g. Jon Haidt). The intuitive appeal of the "phones are rotting everyone's brains" seems to be too strong to overcome with data (and longtime teachers thinking Kids These Days have gotten worse isn't data, it's just the classic Kids These Days phenomenon!) Here is an article by an actual researcher trying to push back, specifically on the link between phone use and anxiety+depression in this case: https://shorturl.at/KSGUb
There's no doubt phones are addictive, btw. But so is TV, and once, so were books, and chess, etc. etc.
The internet has rotted *my* brain. These days it's hard for me to sit down and watch a tv show without also doing something else. I did not have this problem when I was a young man.
I can't watch them at default speed these days, but 1.3-1.5x works as well as it does for Youtube, and you can't go back...
This is so interesting, because it seems like Caplan agrees with the conclusions of Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, but for completely opposite reasons.
They both want to let kids play by themselves more, but Caplan says it doesn’t matter and Haidt says it matters enormously.
I’m more inclined to agree with Haidt but I’m glad to have anyone on my side.
I've got 6 kids, so I've thought about this a lot (maybe not enough!). For context, my kids are in three waves; there are three over 25, who have jobs and health insurance ("the big kids"), two teens in high school ("the teens") and a four year old ("the lockdown baby"). These were all my wife's idea so no one need feel pity for her.
Here are some observations:
* Scott, you are at the hardest part. It gets exponentially easier, energy wise, each year. The emotional work gets harder, though. And you are so lucky to have twins (if you want two kids anyway) since you only have to go through this phase one time.
* For our toddlers we always had a living room area that was blocked off and kid safe. Maybe the entire room, or maybe I put up a kid friendly barrier that was 18inches tall. Inside were pillows and toys and I would lie there and read a book and basically ignore the kid who could not possibly hurt themselves, knew a parent was close by that they could climb on, and would give up crying when they realized I wasn't going to do anything with them anyway. I spent many evenings, and read many books, "watching" kids this way, and I heartily recommend this approach. You can set a glass of wine outside the barrier, safe from little hands, to multitask as it were.
* When the kids are older, having more of them is great. Our three big kids are great friends who spend a lot of time together (two of them share a house with one of theirs' spouse). They also step up and help with all the younger ones. Last week two of the big kids flipped a coin to see which "gets" to take one of the teens to their sleep away music camp this summer (adult chaperone required, neither Ms Spandrel or I can get away). The larger point here is that there is a sort of tipping point where having a larger number of kids leads to a big payoff in family dynamics as they get older. It also helps with the parenting, because they all step up.
* Notably, this only works in a situation/society where not everyone moves away as soon as they are adults. Our big kids all moved away for college and then work, but landed back here during covid, and stayed. I don't know how this would be replicated going forward.
* Regarding free range kids, this is, as far as I can tell, a strictly American problem. When my oldest were 2 and 4 we moved to a Scandinavian capital. It was perfectly normal to park your sleeping toddler outside the shop when you went inside. Eight year olds rode public transit alone. I had friends with 10 year olds who would take the metro to the countryside *alone*, hike into the woods *alone*, fish for a few hours *alone*, and come back home. At first I thought, oh, it's a lot safer here, but when I researched the statistics, I found the relevant crime rates (kidnapping, etc) were similar to that of US cities. That is, they were low in both places. The Scandinavians just thought that independence was more important than fear. I got very used to doing the same thing. Sadly, the first week I was back in the US (after three years away) I parked a toddler outside the store in my bike trailer and came out to find a cop standing there. I'd been reported for child neglect. Sigh. But note that if your 10 year old can take themself fishing (or skating or to the park or whatever) then you as a parent are not busy doing that.
* In the US we generally underestimate how helpful kids can be. Scott's toddlers are not helpful at this age, but if you look up Mayan parenting you'll find that 3 year olds are cleaning the house, cooking taking care of animals. They do it poorly at first, and it even makes a bit more work for the parents, but they learn fast and soon are doing stuff for you, not vice versa. Before I had any kids I was teaching at a high school in Micronesia, and one Saturday the principal took me out to see some of the island. It was us and his three kids, aged 4-8. There was only one paved road, and we were not on it, so of course we had a flat. The principal put on the parking brake and said, lets go rest in the shade. I asked about the flat and he just waved his hand, they'll do it. And yes, the kids without a word of direction put on the parking break, got out the jack, jacked the car, jumped on the lug wrench to get the nuts off, swapped on the spare and lowered the jack. They called dad over to tighten the lug nuts. We sat in the shade with warm beer and betelnut. When I expressed my amazement, dad said, "I figured if I'm going to have kids, they need to help out". I think this has been the situation historically in western culture as well, but somehow we lost track of it.
* Speaking of things we lost track of, I think richer countries have lost a great deal of collective knowledge about raising kids because a) we have fewer b) extended families have fragmented geographically and c) kids are siloed away from adults. I read an article once somewhere which made the point - plausible to me - that up until say the post war period, children were a common feature of pretty much everywhere. Fields, factories, shops, estates, streets, taverns - there were kids of all ages. So pretty much everyone had experience every day with little humans of different ages, and there was a lot of collective knowledge about how to manage them. Starting after the war this changed dramatically, with suburbs, college, geographic mobility - suddenly it was all up to the stay at home moms to figure everything out, without the benefit of any experience. From what I've read of 19th century fiction this narrative rings true, but I can't find any data per se. Still, it seems clear that today there are many adults who have had no contact with kids since they babysat their cousin and it makes the whole prospect of parenting seem difficult and alien.
* In Mediterranean countries (say), you see kids out in the evenings playing around the cafes and in the shops and working in the market - and the adults are doing their own thing but also attentive to whatever kid happens to be nearby. We took our then 3 year old to Morocco last summer, and in every town and market she was treated and cuddled and dandled - and if she was bawling (unavoidable when everything is strange and she just wants to see the family dog again) - strangers stepped up to entertain her, not to give us bad looks. Our society doesn't have to be the way it is.
* As with marriage, I think parenthood in the US is made harder by the delayed start. When people get married at 21, they aren't set in their ways, don't know where they are going - they're flexible and have tons of energy. Now people wait until they are 35 and it's *hard* to integrate your life with that of another adult. Same with parenting. I had some friends who had their kids at 21-24. I thought they were nuts, as I had fun and they were changing diapers and waking up all night. But it was really all they knew of married life and adult life. And then 10 years later, when I had my first kid, theirs were in school, taking care of themselves, and the parents were enjoying life. Meanwhile we were finding it very *hard* to adapt to the disruption to what had become very set ways. This observation doesn't help anyone who is 30, but if you are young and want kids, I'd say, get started.
* Phones are the worst. They are different than anything before. With the big kids we dealt with the internet and FB and online games but it was pretty easy to monitor. Smartphones are the devil's sandbox - just looking at inane instagram content will mush your brain, not to mentoin all the evil stuff out there, they dark corners of reddit. And it is hard to do without a phone, especially if they are going to free roam (which they do, they get around town on transit or foot, which saves us tons of schlepping). Our school was one of the first in the US with a cellphone ban, which is fantastic. At home they are expected to dock it in the kitchen at 6pm - they can come in and text friends etc but not sit in their room looking at random crap. And they know I have the security codes and can spot check at random (which is not very often, usually if they have been down and we're worried about bullying etc). If they break the rules there is a spare dumb phone (Nokia, $29) they get to use for a week. But it is a constant battle, and we struggle with it all the time. Smartphones are addictive!
I agree that we have made parenting too hard.
Just a few observations on parenting and society.
Everything I wanted to post is in your post. Totally agree. I would only add that there are neighborhoods here where young kids walking to school etc alone is normalized, so look out for those places if you have flexibility of living location.
Another aspect of the younger start is then the grandparents are also younger and have more energy to help out. Having a 45 year old grandparent instead of a 65 year old grandparent helping with a infant or toddler is a big difference.
You started at 31 and had six kids while also spending time in lots of different countries? It sounds like you've had a very busy life!
My wife and I both grew up in different, non American, cultures so have always had atypical (for Americans) expections about how much one should cater to kids. We have never hesitated to haul the kids around wherever we wanted to go, she even more a champ at this than I. I recall swimming down a undergound glacier-melt river in Turkey with a 2 year old - just put 'em in a life vest with a helmet - and the older kids were there to help toss them over the waterfalls. Notably the local guide also embraced the challenge. It was super cold but awesome fun.
Now, after all these years, my wife fears taking them out of the country - since they are obviously not 100% Caucasian, she expects ICE will detain us all on the way back in. Sad!
But I can't think of anything better to do with one's life and resources than experience new things. Which yes keeps one busy.
Great article, and I strongly agree with most of the ideas about 'less is more' parenting. I have many friends and family members who are parents, many of them single parents, and they very often fret over their children, never get away from their children, drive themselves to make the experiences of those children perfect while also running themselves into the ground and being somewhat miserable to spend time with, which seems counterproductive.
Since I'm not naming names, I can also say that their self-esteem is held together with duct tape and baling wire, and they need to feel like they're very important parents who will make all the difference between their child being a validated joy machine who siezes the world or a broken addict who wishes they were never born.
I don't want them to stop caring about what they do, but I do want them to have some perspective.
All that said, I do think we underestimate the social bit. It's not just police officers who judge: middle class modern American families are known for being all fakesmiles on the outside but extremely harsh and dismissive and accusatory with their gossip when backs are turned, and I think that any parent these days who doesn't make a show of hovering over their kids is assumed to be neglectful. It's the standard for parenting. The teachers and the neighbors and even others in your family will take note if you weren't there, protecting or arranging constant protection. It's not about kidnapping or drugs or screens, either. It's about simply falling down the stairs or throwing up your lunch, things our ancestors would have been annoyed with or even found funny.
We see kids as delicate. We're encouraged to, as we're obsessed with trauma and believe that kids need to be sheltered to allow them to become their authentic selves without getting prodded by social pressure or phobias. This isn't entirely a left-wing phenomenon, parents do it across the spectrum, but the morose parsing of pop psychology is somewhat left-coded and I do think you get a stronger whif of it around the electric car set.
The safe answer to this is to keep kids in the hosue, where no one at Target can hear them having a tantrum that makes you look like you deprive them, and no one can see them pulling a 12-pack of Mountain Dew onto their heads while you're in Housewares. Of course they're on their phones when they're at home, which is probably less bad than we think... but I would still advise everyone to support Jonathan Haidt as he crusades against phones in schools.
So I would encourage people to ease off on the parents that they know and stop overthinking things. We're culturally programmed to be critical of authority figures, including parents, and to assume that something in childhood is responsible for most of our issues. This mindset needs to take a Xanax. Most parents are doing fine, they're overdoing it if anything, and I think it's good to assume their kids will become who they're supposed to become and have a laugh with them without judgment.
Parenting can be fun, I've seen it. I DO believe it's profound and necessary for the continuation of society, don't ask me why, call it intuition.
>Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.
Communities!
My mother lived two blocks from her mother! Her mother lived in the same house with her mother! Family watched their kids whenever they needed some time or just for fun.
Both of them knew the names and general backgrounds of every couple within three blocks, and 'playdates' where a bunch of kids went to one house for half a day or more were the norm.
Local communities where your kid can walk over to a friend's house are great. Outside of meals/baths/etc., one parent can secondary-care or even primary-care 5 kids almost as easily as one, even more easily in some cases as they entertain each other. If you have 5 parent-friends with similar-age kids within walking distance, you can watch a gaggle of kids 1 night a week and have an empty house the other 4.
I don't agree with Bryan's overall thesis, it's too obvious to me from knowing people raised different ways, that good parenting - especially without neglect and abuse - is necessary for someone to be a good person along the dimensions that matter to me, and that doing so is actually a ton of work. Being a good dad is a massive life-long commitment. The twin studies he cites are just not likely to be measuring any of the stuff on the inputs or outputs that really matters to me.
Anyways, I have the time and energy to be a good parent to one kid, but not two, so that's how many I have.
On kids walking to school alone, etc, this may be frowned upon by the police where you are in SF, but in the nicer areas of South Bay it is super common. Lots of young kids are walking alone to and from the local public school here. It is quite normalized.
Mrs. AWall and I have three, including a set of twins. I can seriously sympathize with feeling overwhelmed with childcare. The cost of hiring additional help is nothing to sneeze at either; we paid for as little as we could get by with (e.g., no nannies, few babysitters) and were still shilling out about $40k per year in childcare at the peak. There are no perfect answers, so I’d say Caplan is right about being easier on yourself and how much you take on.
As for the kids playing outside matter, my experience was that our kids rarely played outside unsupervised until after COVID. When that happened, we ended up getting to know our neighbors better. This led to a greatly improved level of social trust in that we all look out for each other’s kids. Now, they are free to play outside unsupervised as long as they are in the area where we know mostly everyone. In an increasingly individualistic and atomized world, I can see that becoming less and leas common.
Does anyone have any intuition how the phone addicted and checked out moron undergrads squares with Tyler Cowen's contention that such people he interacts with are much smarter than they used to be?
First I must say that your twins are adorable. I miss those days.
Next, I am biased. I love Bryan’s essays and books. I share his thoughts on being a parent.
Finally, I am a dad with three children (now mostly grown—21, 25 & 27).
I became a full time parent (a professional parent) when our oldest son was diagnosed with ASD. But even so, I found myself with plenty of time for my own enterprises—I own a small business and I am something of perpetual student (about 75-100 books per year).
When our children were all in some form of school, they would all come home and play together. They enjoyed the same TV shows and would find other ways to entertain themselves. (They also had playdates and other outlets.)
Once real schoolwork began (my oldest was in first or second grade), I started to earn my keep—spending many hours with all three in the afternoons and in particular my oldest.
Fast forward to fifth grade, now my boys had become avid gamers (my wife blames my brother for giving them a GameCube). My third grade son got his older brother to lobby me for video gaming privileges during the school week. I agreed provisionally as long as work was completed and their school performance was maintained.
Today our sons are both engineers and our daughter is a year from graduating college—majoring in psychology.
We basically ignored conventional wisdom: the opinions of our friends and families. We never talked about SAT scores or colleges. All three kids picked their own majors and schools (and we were happy that most people never heard of those schools).
The bottom line is that I knew that our children would turn out well no matter what we did or didn’t do.
Why?—because my wife and I did.
PS—I came from a “broken home” with parents who cared more about hurting each other than being my parents. I barely graduated from HS and moved out and away from home on the day of my graduation. I joined the Army and later graduated from college and law school. Regardless of how bad my parents were, they were both extremely intelligent and successful people—apart from being miserable parents.
It's the phones. I had a friend who did afternoon activities for kids. She told me that a few years ago, when a group of small kids waited for the activities to start, they were running around, kicking balls, yelling at each other, having fun. Now the kids of the same age just keep standing silently, and if she asks them why they don't play, they sadly say "I don't have my phone here".
We tried to avoid this with our kids, but recently we bought a phone to our 10 years old, because all her classmates already have one. So while they are waiting for an afternoon club, she cannot talk to anyone anyway, because everyone else is busy playing with their phones -- she is the only one standing there without anything to do. So we bought her the phone, but she is only allowed to use it that one day when she has the after-school club; she is not allowed to use the phone any other day or at home. (We try to nudge our kids towards our ideas of good like, but we try to not make them look like weirdos too much, that could backfire.)
Ironically, most people around me think that I am the one who is careless about the dangers of technology, because my kids had their computers at home since they were about five. In my opinion, a phone is more dangerous than a computer. When you go outside, you leave the computer at home, but take the phone with you. (We encouraged going outside by measuring time: for each minute spent outside the kids gained the privilege of spending one minute by the computer.) When you go to the kitchen to eat, you leave the computer in the room, but take the phone with you. When you go to school, etc. Also, on a computer you can e.g. paint or write code; on a phone you can only play and browse social networks.
Scott, do you still play video games, Civ or otherwise? Do you find it addictive or at least super-stimulating - taking over time you would rather do lower dopamine hobbies? For me, I only play 5-10 hours a week, and I would say it borders on addiction, even though I run a business and have three kids. I attribute this to my parents not having stricter parameters on my gaming as a kid. I guess I carry this into my argument against screens for children.
As a gaming addict myself, I think it's more that I'm psychologically predisposed to gaming, and the only chance to not get addicted would be to completely avoid exposure, including in young adult years (where the parents would have no influence anyway). I did quit it cold turkey in my mid-late 20s (when I became more influenced by the perceived social stigma and also found other entertaining activities). What I now think might have helped would be if my parents were more encouraging so that I didn't feel the need to escape real life - but they probably did their best anyway.
I definitely agree about the psychological predisposition. I've seen many men and women that just don't have that draw which I have. I feel like my parents were very encouraging, yet I still had that draw... It's a complex issue.
Lovely family - very happy for you. There are obviously significant economies of scale available with at least one stay at home parent if you don't needlessly overdo the spending per child (private school? nah. AI homsechool). Basically opposite of South Korea. Caplan is probably right that most of the possible spending doesn't matter much. Related: extremely permissive parenting advocacy (grok/google Sovereign Child -Stupple)
Long live the free range children movement and down with the helicopter parents and tiger moms!😎
> Every generation of Romans worried they were growing decadent and courting disaster. But eventually Rome did grow decadent and collapse.
I'm not convinced this is true. Rome did collapse. (Kind of) But was that due to decadance? I was under the impression that the reasons for collapse involved chronic lead poisoning leading to bad decisions. And/or excess military spending causing hyperinflation. Neither of these things really fit the implicit implications of "decadence". The story might be "romans worried about decadance for centuries, then some unrelated thing caused the empire to collapse".
Here are the things I want to say to you after reading this:
I love this post. Thank you.
I get the sense—though maybe I'm wrong—that there's a bit of “If other parents can handle this many childcare hours and I’m not doing anything obviously different, then I must be deficient” going on? If so, I want to push back on that.
I can’t do two hours of childcare a day without unraveling into a sobbing, panicky mess within a week—even though by all accounts, Cadence has been an unusually easy-to-parent baby and toddler. I think that while I’m with them, I’m an excellent parent. But I stay that way by some days not seeing them at all, and by rarely being with them for more than a couple hours at a time.
I knew this would be true of me going in. It’s why I agreed to become a parent only under very unusual circumstances that wouldn’t require more conventional parenting from me.
And I think that’s fine. I think I’m not just a decent person, but also a good parent. My brain processes things the way it does. Babies impact me the way they do. I need certain support structures to parent well, just like I need various kinds of support to do anything well. I don't think it matters to my worthiness or adequacy what supports other people do or don't need. Cadence is happy and thriving. When they boop my nose, I make a funny noise. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I imagine this perspective might be relatively rare, and possibly useful to hear.
And to be clear, I recognize your situation has been deeply unfine—at least pre-supplemental-nanny—in that you were stuck parenting more than was good for you. But I don’t believe there’s some minimum number of childcare hours per day that one must tolerate without stress or breakdown in order to count as a good parent. I don’t think needing less chaos and more focus makes you a worse person. And depending on how you respond to that fact, I don’t think it makes you a worse parent either.
Thanks for the reassurance, that's helpful. But:
> "I can’t do two hours of childcare a day without unraveling into a sobbing, panicky mess within a week—even though by all accounts, Cadence has been an unusually easy-to-parent baby and toddler."
I know it's weird talking about your personal child in a blog comment, or disagreeing with you about your child's personality, but our mutual friends who have helped you with childcare say that Cadence is great but demands so so many walks that it leaves them much more exhausted than when caring for other toddlers.
oh i forgot about them needing walks as an infant! feels like it's been such a long time since that was a thing. these days we set them loose on the trampoline or a playground instead.
I wish Caplan had emphasized more in his book how very different the different phases of childhood are from a difficulty-vs-benefit-of-time-spent-with-kids perspective. Ages 1-4 are waaaaaay harder and more boring than 4-8 which are also much harder and more boring than 9+. And the nerdier your kids are the more this is true.
True recent story: my 12yo son and I have a long running game of FizzBuzz, where you say ever-higher integers using codes for their prime factors, or just the integer if none of the codes apply, and he keeps making up more codes for factors so he can say more cool things, so e.g. 89 is now "actinium" because that's the atomic number for actinium, and 101 is "dalmatians" because of course it is. He spent a long time coming up with and rejecting codes for 11, until finally he hit on the perfect one: 11 is "chametz"... because it's a leaven.
The point is, you are in the middle of the worst drudgery and most of the greatest joys are ahead of you.
All I can think of is this classic Simpsons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbOSm_1FDZY
I can’t tell you how happy it makes me in terms of trusting your reasonings and investing time reading you, to know you’re a harried parent. It seems a part of development most should have…and this from a person who’s not had it.
I have a 3yo and an almost-2yo, and one thing I’ve observed is that different kids require a lot more attention, even in the 6mo-18mo range. This can lead to very qualitatively different degrees of exhaustion. And of course people over extrapolate from their own experience, it’s hard not to. You might even write a book inflected with your own experience! For me, anyway, seeing some kids who require comparatively little effort vs. my own made me realize that the distribution is wide.
(Typed out while my 3yo took a long shower and needed something from me about every 45 seconds.)
As an antinatalist, those are very cute kids.
I've worked in education a short time, and it's not just learning which is poorer than when I was at school, but behaviour as well. But ironically, pedagogy is way better. I would kill to have been taught using the skills and techniques they use today. I would have learnt so much faster.
And at the risk of sounding bonkers, I don't think it's just parenting, technology and social media. There are studies that have shown that mattresses emit chemicals that disrupt brain development, and for a while now it's been established that a few food diet (used for allergy treatment) can treat some kids adhd, and a recent study found that a healthy diet was even more effective, possibly comparable to the effects of medication. There's also evidence that the increasing amount of processed foods each generation eats is linked to the youth mental health crisis.
Insightful bit form a recent Andrew Rilstone essay:
> Twice a week someone writes an article about what the Internet has taken away from us, and how wonderful it would be if we didn’t have mobile phones. “Oh, the wifi went down one night and there was beautiful silence and conversation and we all started to play charades, darling!”
>
> “Why don’t you play charades when the wifi is not down?”
>
> Because we don’t want to.
>
> I find the people who pull out their phones the moment there is a lull in the conversation incredibly irritating. I get so annoyed that I pull out my phone and post something amusing about them on Twitter. I am distracted by the people who text in cinemas or at gigs: not by the light or the noise, particularly. I am distracted by the mere fact of other people being distracted even if they are not distracting me.
>
> But people who get out their phones during the good bit of a film, or when I am coming to the punchline of a joke they have only heard three or four times before are the same people who used to pull paperback books out of their pockets on movie night; whose face was always obscured by the Times or the Daily Mirror; who wouldn’t make eye-contact with me at breakfast because they were more interested in the ingredients on the orange juice carton. And there were kids who used to get hit with the big stick for fidgeting and not paying attention at school; and ladies who wouldn’t go anywhere, including theatres and prayer meetings, without their knitting, and men who knew very well that smoking was incredibly bad for them but needed something to do with their hands.
>
> And people have always liked pictures of ladies with no clothes on and cute kittens: what do you think tabloid newspapers were for?
>
> Phones don’t irritate people; people irritate people.
I don't think this dissolves the Problem Of Phones entirely but internalising it makes me a lot less worried about things like the gym story.
I find that I don't (metaphorically) play charades when the power is on, but enjoy it a lot when there's a blackout. You can talk all you want about how this makes me a bad person, but that's just how it is. People bring up the idea of addiction (something you don't want to do, but do anyway) to explain this, and whether or not you like using that exact word I don't think it's useful to deny the phenomenon.
There's something to it, but I do think the problem is overstated because people are afraid or embarrassed to admit that they like modern, "easy" pleasures better than classier pastimes. There's definitely a sense in which scrolling through reddit in public is lower-status than reading a print newspaper, and I don't think there's any sensible reason for that.
(There is also a related but distinct thing, which is really what I was most struck by in the extract I posted, where a kind of Protestant-work-ethic-derived "purity drive" makes it low-status to admit that you'd rather do two things at once than stay laser-focused on a single activity, albeit a pleasant one. We don't begrudge runners their earphones. And no one expects someone at the gym to be bench-pressing non-stop; taking short rest stops is part of the process. Why would it be nobler to spend them staring off into the void, rather than catching up on DMs? Phones in classrooms might sap away too much of a student's attention but in a case like *this* I really don't see the downside to alleviating boredom.)
None of these things is as adversarial (optimized to draw as much of your attention as possible) as social media or contemporary video games.
I'm not sure why you would think twin one year-olds would NOT be exhausting. I wouldn't worry about this too much if I were you...most parents and all kids don't even remember this stage later, ergo, why worry about it.
Parents mostly are crazy today because they have time to be. When you have 3+ kids, you can't bother worrying so much, so you don't (I note this from observation of my many neighbors with 4+ kids).
Yes we roamed and did all kinds of stuff as kids in the 80s, but also, our parents didn't necessarily know what we were doing. I rode my bike for miles, but my parents didn't know about it. They had no way to know what we were doing, there was no tracking, and we all just lied constantly to our parents.
In the 90s, when I was 12, I babysat after school for an infant under aged one and three children under age six. I was paid three dollars an hour for this. I am pretty sure no one would allow a twelve year to watch four children under age six alone nowadays, including one that was an infant and still on a bottle. It was fine, no one ever got hurt or died.
My parents were typical slackers not paying much attention when I was a kid, and they mostly let me play in the yard or my room alone. I locked myself into bathrooms several time as 2-4 year old. I climbed a ceiling-high bookshelf and brought it crashing down upon me. I climbed and jumped out of my second story window. I was cooking myself hotdogs and such by age six and only started a kitchen fire twice. At age three I was caught playing with matches. The point is that in fact we were doing dangerous things, but mostly didn't die nor burn the house down, though every once in while those things did in fact happen. When I was in elementary school two kids died because they broke through ice on a pond and died, for example. It just wasn't something parents worried about so much because most still didn't read news except in a newspaper and it wasn't as salient.
Worrying about kidnapping is silly -- no one wants anyone else's kids. It's so rare when it happens without it being caught quickly that it's national news for months and they're making Netflix documentaries years later.
Gosh, reading all these comments on how three year olds are self sufficient and won't run into traffic... My NINE year old ran directly in front of a car during school dropoff because he was too absent minded. He was stubborn as hell as a baby and would scream for hours to get his way (I also was stubborn as hell, which is why it was hours). Last year he got a diagnosis of ADHD/ODD - I was so firmly of the view that "ADHD etc. behavioural disorders are highly overdiagnosed and it's mostly just a bunch of weak willed parents", it took until COVID home schooling for me to suspect something, and even longer for my wife to accept it. Medication seems to help and Child #2 has been phenomenally easier with no behavioural problems. All this to say - if you're really trying the "hands off" parenting method and it's not working, don't just assume the problem is you.
I'd also say: the first was the hardest because at that time you are also changing who you are as a person. In an analogy I picked up from Russ Roberts, you're becoming a vampire - a fundamental change to who you are that you wouldn't reverse but that cannot be adequately communicated to those who haven't experienced the change themselves. I was highly resistant to this change for the first ~3 years of my first son, still trying to hustle and hold friendships going to dinners and maintain an active lifestyle. By the time #2 came I was willing to give up a lot of that, be less stubborn and just let my kid watch TV or whatever (within limits, I still hate them watching any streaming content even though my wife is a constant enabler) and the experience is vastly different.
Perhaps you see yourself and Bryan Caplan as sitting on different ends of some spectrum of parenting intensity, but I suspect that, if zoomed out, you’d look like two ants near the end of a very big log.
I shouldn’t assume, but I will. I assume you BOTH have a decent cushion in the bank, a decent level of generational wealth in at least one partner’s family, a decent level of confidence in your own earning potential, and a decent level of confidence in your children carrying a better-than-average set of genetic potentialities.
For people like you (or, if I’ve missed the mark, like this) the parenting intensity debate sounds like so much navel-gazing and existential guilt and even awe (what am I here for if not to bask in the joys of the parental mentorship role? am I selfish for not addressing my OWN phone addiction? did I really play my cards so right that I can treat parenting like the royalty of yesteryear got to? etc.).
For the other half, which I will define as those who can’t afford to have one of their adult offspring end up in a state of permanent dependence due to either a series of parental failures or One Really Big Mistake, it’s perfectly rational to parent intensively in an effort to set their offspring on a more secure and lucrative life path. If you consider the purchasing power of today’s dollar, the cost of living, and the stagnation of wages (which we fretted about in the 90s when we were young and which has now persisted for another entire generation since), “let your kids run about and eventually they’ll be fine” could be described as a poor prediction of future outcomes. Actually, no, the average middle-class kids are not alright (do they even exist?), and no, you can no longer buy a decent family home and pay the bills on a single not-so-ambitious wage earner’s income.
So you’ve got some people (would-be members of the mythical and perhaps extinct middle-class, defined and trapped by their mediocrity) who are rationally intensifying their parenting and others (you) who are rationally wondering why the numbers look that way, and you won’t make sense of the overall picture without an understanding of these demographics and the economic climate.
The impact of AI is another interesting factor. But perhaps it cuts the other way? The middle class have been intensifying their parenting in recent decades due to offshoring, and AI threatens to “offshore” the laptop class? That would make the more contemporary neuroses of “the elite” seem more rational: to the extent that they wish both to have a rich family life and legacy and also not to doom their children to an impoverished future (and perhaps to the extent that they have even seen whiffs of such a danger in their less fortunate contemporaries while successfully insulating themselves to date), it would make sense that they would both continue procreating AND be fretting more and more about it in recent years.
I also think there’s an element of “here’s what messed me up: the intensity of being somewhat intensely parented in the somewhat more insecure 90s/00s without emotionally educated adults to help me process that pressure” and that turns into “okay now I can’t let off the gas for economic reasons but I ALSO have to set my kids up for mental wellness and self-love” and that’s a huge interpersonal project whose labor intensity cannot be managed (there’s no dishwasher or ready-made dinner equivalent for emotionally-focused child care).
I guess this is all to take your AI inflection and use it to paint a richer picture of the current parenting zeitgeist. I suppose your solution—just don’t—does address one major chunk of these problems. But in my view, it doesn’t adequately account for the massive social upheaval that we could expect to result anytime an older generation vastly outnumbered its descendants (see baby boom on steroids). I think AI raises the stakes significantly (and perhaps it means intensive parenting is the ONLY possible way for a child to escape being shuffled into elder care). But I don’t think it’s irrational to see the jobs problem AND the looming generational collapse problem (if anti-natalist advocacy succeeded or anti-natalist choices became widespread) and to make the game theoretic choice not to “defect” (where “defection” could also be criticized as freeloading in any scenario in which the defector nonetheless chooses to live past the senility/frailty tipping point, say retirement for the sake of argument).
I glossed over this, but Caplan spends a lot of the book focusing on twin studies that he thinks (and I agree) prove that intensive parenting doesn't make as much difference as people think. It's not just "my kids have a cushion so they can afford to fail", it's that it doesn't matter because your intensive parenting doesn't affect the chance of failure.
There are a few caveats to this, most notably that it can't prove anything about forms of parenting so strange or intense that few examples made it into the studies. And I'll be writing in a few weeks about challenges to twin studies and whether or not they stick.
That’s an important nuance to address: maybe the desperation is understandable given the circumstances (I predict that my children will struggle economically absent some intervention, either personal or structural, and I’m probably right) but the approach is misguided (I predict that this particular intervention will help a lot, but I’m probably wrong).
I’ve never dug into the twin studies, so I look forward to reading your forthcoming work on this. My intuition is that (1) there can be both increasing and diminishing returns on parenting intensity and (2) directionality is key.
On (2), the Williams sisters were coached intensively by their father, had some degree of natural aptitude, and were lucky enough to be coached in the “right” sport for their particular physical and mental traits. I think this latter factor gets little attention and it doesn’t seem possible to give it decent treatment in twin studies, but perhaps I’m wrong.
To put some more meat on the bones, if you intensely parent a could-be Olympic gymnast toward cross-country running or adopt a laissez-faire approach, you may fail to see the insane payout that gymnastics coaching would have had in that child’s life, and both children may end up in similar places later in life. So it may not be a binary choice (to spend lots of time parenting or to let your kids run free), as the intensity can take flavors that are either counter-productive, simply not all that helpful, or wildly productive for the child. I realize that I’m being somewhat loose in my definition of intense parenting (lots of quality time vs targeted hothousing/coaching), but I wonder if any of the twin studies really captured the directionality variable. Are separated identical twins less likely than other children to receive intense parenting that is also extremely attuned to the potential of the child? My prediction is that the average adoptive parents, despite their best intentions, would be flying blinder than the average parent with respect to the genetic potential and inchoate emotional tendencies/personality traits of their children (lacking the ability to see their younger selves in their mini-mes), so perhaps twin studies can’t really answer this question for us as well as they can others.
I also think it’s important to recognize that intensity of parenting can have wildly different expressions along the axis of emotional valence. In other words, cranky, maladjusted, or resentful parents may harm their children by spending a lot of time with them, while well-adjusted parents may give them a boost by doing the same. I wonder if he mentioned, or you know of, any twin studies that account for this. It’s similar to the directionality point, but it operates more in the realm of mental and emotional health. Perhaps you have insight from your professional experience.
It strikes me that one measure of how good a country's immigration system is how much higher ALL 2018 is than NAT 2018.
By this measure, just about every country has a failing immigration system. The US actually isn't that bad, it's only -3 compared to -16 in Austria or -22 in Germany. At a quick scan, Australia is the only country where this number is actually positive, and New Zealand the only country where it's zero.
You object that intelligence isn't everything, maybe we should be optimising for immigrants who are hard-working or nice or good-looking or creative instead of just smart, and that's a reasonable point, but if you're a first-world country then demand for immigration places sufficiently exceeds supply that you could optimise for all of these things at once. Right now, immigration to first-world countries shows no sign of being optimised for anything.
I agree with most of your points, but my model of pro-immigration advocates like Bryan Caplan is that they would object that if you're in a bar, and ten low-IQ people walk into the bar, you have technically "lowered the average IQ" of the bar but nobody (including you) is worse off. You and your smart friends are as smart as ever, and can invent just as many rocket ships or whatever, but now you also have a lot of cheap labor, and potential friends who can benefit you in ways other than intelligence.
I think this underweights the degree to which we live in a society whose norms and politics are an average of what works for all of their members, but that it's not completely wrong - I basically take it something like 50% seriously.
I feel like when you do an argument from analogy, you're supposed to reach for an analogy which helps to make the original situation clearer, not an analogy which strips the original situation of most of the important features and makes it all better.
"There's a bear in my living room and it won't leave" "Ah yes, but what if you just saw a bear walking past the house, that wouldn't be so bad, would it?"
Obviously there's many important ways in which a bar is not like a country, which seem too obvious to even bother listing.
When the smart people are "diluted", that makes it more difficult for them to find each other, even if their absolute numbers stay the same. The analogy could be that you and your friends are together somewhere, and then a large mob of strangers enters the room and gets you separated... you know that your friends are still there somewhere, but you can't see them.
You and your friends can keep inventing rocket ships, but you also need to start homeschooling your kids, because the educational system adapted to lower IQ is no longer capable of producing rocket ship builders. (Perhaps this part is less visible for Caplan who already homeschools his kids.)
Parenting is hard, but then so is every worthwhile undertaking; I'm not sure why anyone would suggest otherwise. Also, why would the phenomenon of declining school performance be considered 'fake' on the basis of one significant contributor being demographic shift? Doesn't the term 'fake' suggest a deliberate attempt to deceive? I don't think anyone's trying to make school results out to be even worse than they really are - if anything, the opposite (in Australia, lower-performing students are often discouraged from taking the standardised testing).
The supposed 'golden age' of free-range kids - the 70s and 80s, I guess - masked much parental negligence, benign at best, and at worst turning blind eyes to abuse. The Australian journalist Richard Glover's riveting 2015 memoir deals with this (noting that at least one of his parents was an alcoholic; not uncommon). The 'helicopter parenting' of later decades was at least in part a reaction. I'm wondering if Caplan addresses this aspect? Haidt and Lukianoff, in The Coddling of the American Mind, tend to gloss over it if I'm remembering the book accurately (was a while ago I read it).
https://www.amazon.com.au/Flesh-Wounds-Richard-Glover/dp/0733334326
> The supposed 'golden age' of free-range kids - the 70s and 80s, I guess - masked much parental negligence, benign at best, and at worst turning blind eyes to abuse.
But people did have more kids. Perhaps that's the price that is paid for a sustainable society.
I'm also from that era, and most of my friends (like me) had one sibling at most. So I'm not sure that larger families were the norm; if anything, I think that today's higher incomes have encouraged more choice about family size. FWIW, the official stats suggest that the births per woman from 1984 and from 2013 were nearly identical (Australia, being where I'm from): 1.881 (1984) and 1.882 (2013), i.e. close enough to 2, see table 3 on p. 14 here:
https://www.academia.edu/27963426/Australian_family_diversity_An_historical_overview_1960_2015
I meant "fake" in the sense that it would mean that no individual child was getting worse, and we wouldn't need to search for culprits like phones or bad policy.
"But for the Straussian interpretation, check what town is in the upper right"
This seems pretty obviously not what is going on given that this trend has occurred even relative to high-crime 80s-90s, and all over the anglosphere.
Sorry, I meant it as a joke rather than an attempt at a real explanation of the trend.
One of the big things that I haven't seen discussed here is there's actually a big difference between physical and mental labor in the home when it comes to watching children. If you are doing textile production for example as people (mostly women) have done since antiquity then maintaining an awareness of a child not difficult, you can even chat with them to keep them and you entertained while performing the necessary and productive work.
But this doesn't work when it comes to mental labor like trying to write a blog post, you can't watch them well and having them draw your attention away constantly hurts your productivity. I don't think there's anything really to be done about it, but I think it is important to not get into the thinking of "I'm working from home so should be able to watch the kids easily."
I found it very difficult to complete even the most basic and necessary household tasks while caring for very young children, which is one of the reasons it's psychologically draining: you think 'I should be able to do the washing, but I can't...' The only solution was to put off the tasks, and wholeheartedly join in playing 'Jason and the Argonauts Defeat the Harpies' one more time instead.
This! I think it’s a very under appreciated difference between traditional parenting and modern WFH parenting.
Another argument in favour of the second nanny/ babysitter: two parent households is very unnatural for humans. It’s crazy how much easier it is to handle a toddler when 3 people are on the task vs 2, and how much easier 4 is than 3. We used to do it as villages. Having family around is a massive help. Failing that, it’s fair to outsource.
Someone told me a funny story about someone who grew up in Samoa where parenting is easy because it’s a group task and parents hardly get to see their kids with all the family around (according to this anecdote - no idea of veracity). They moved to America Samoa and thought it would be just as easy - and they couldn’t believe how hard it was as two parents alone in a suburban context. Don’t know if this makes sense or is true, so just take it as a fable.
I read SRtHMK and I gotta say I now understand where the disconnect between that book and my own experience as a new father came from: we are not a household that can afford a nanny and two babysitters on a single income.
SRtHMK(IYAR)
This.
Caplan sounds like Mitt Romney telling college students, “If you can’t afford tuition, no problem, just borrow the money from your parents!” Um, thanks.
> “traditional kidnapping” where a creep in a white van plucks a child off the streets is much rarer - only about 100 such incidents come to the attention of the authorities per year. Even if the true number is 10x higher (is this is a reasonable multiplier?)
No? Why in the world would 90% of child-abduction-by-strangers go unreported? People keep track of where their children are, become extremely agitated if they can't, and have no desire to protect strangers from the police.
It could be true that 90% of abduction-by-strangers goes unreported because nobody ever realizes it happened, but in that case you wouldn't want to include those cases in your risk calculations because they don't feature any risk.
Also:
> only about 100 such incidents come to the attention of the authorities per year. Even if the true number is 10x higher (is this is a reasonable multiplier?) that’s still only 1/70,000 children per year. On the other hand, over ~ten years of relevant childhood (I’m assuming babies can’t get into white vans, and nobody wants to kidnap 17 year olds) that’s a 1/7,000 chance.
If you calculate the total per-childhood risk from the 100/year figure, it shouldn't matter how for many years of childhood the risk exists for! If it exists for a longer period, that increases the number the per-year risk should be multiplied with, but it also proportionately increases the number of children of those ages in the US, and thus proportionately decreases the peer-year risk. Converting it to a per-year-per-child risk and then back to a per-childhood risk just adds error.
There was a similar problem that baffled me in coverage of covid.
At some point the media went into a frenzy over the realization that people could be infected without showing any symptoms (ever). There was a blitz of coverage with the message "this shows that things are much worse than we thought!"
But it's impossible for that to reveal that things are worse than we thought. You have a certain number of problems that arise from the disease. We had been measuring the disease by counting those problems.
If you learn that it's common to have the disease without having any problems, then your estimate of the prevalence of the disease goes up by a lot, which the media coverage successfully realized.
They didn't seem to realize that your estimate of how much of a problem it is to have the disease goes down by an amount that exactly balances this. The two effects _must_ balance exactly, because the number of problems doesn't change!
For your point:
> If you calculate the total per-childhood risk from the 100/year figure, it shouldn't matter how for many years of childhood the risk exists for!
It definitely matters how many years the risk exists for in terms of the definition of childhood used to report the annual statistic. If that statistic is reporting annual kidnappings of 0-10-year-olds, but kidnappings of 11-35-year-olds also exist and are simply reported separately, you'll draw the wrong conclusions by only looking at 0-10-year-olds.
> At some point the media went into a frenzy over the realization that people could be infected without showing any symptoms (ever). There was a blitz of coverage with the message "this shows that things are much worse than we thought!"
That may have been reasonable at some point depending on the details of the argument: that it could be had and transmitted asymptomatically meant the chain of transmission couldn't be broken buy just quarantining symptomatic cases, as was done with SARS v1 (?).
> It definitely matters how many years the risk exists for in terms of the definition of childhood used to report the annual statistic. If that statistic is reporting annual kidnappings of 0-10-year-olds, but kidnappings of 11-35-year-olds also exist and are simply reported separately, you'll draw the wrong conclusions by only looking at 0-10-year-olds.
It does matter whether what the statistic considers childhood is the same as what Scott does, but it didn't sound like Scott checked that.
> that it could be had and transmitted asymptomatically meant the chain of transmission couldn't be broken buy just quarantining symptomatic cases, as was done with SARS v1 (?).
And it also shows that breaking the chain of transmission is not important. The idea of breaking the chain of transmission was to prevent an increase in problems. If it turns out that transmission was going without impediment the whole time, that means... letting transmission go can't cause an increase in problems.
Once you've learned that "we've been having massive outbreaks everywhere, but nobody noticed", there is no reason to try to prevent "outbreaks" (what would the difference be?), nor does it make conceptual sense to refer to "outbreaks".
> If it turns out that transmission was going without impediment the whole time, that means... letting transmission go can't cause an increase in problems.
It could, at the beginning when only a small fraction of the population had already been infected (even counting the asymptomatic cases). Idk at what point the media frenzy you referred to happened.
> One potential argument is that the child trends mostly mirror adult trends. Adult accident death rates have also gone way down (and adult murder rates stayed about the same) since the 1960s. The simplest explanation is that child trends simply mirror adults. And the adult trend certainly isn’t caused by coddling. So maybe the kids aren’t either.
Consider the possibility that adult accidental death rates are going down because adults don't go outside anymore either. Adults nowadays spend much less time out and about with people---they're much more likely to be inside, watching Netflix or doing something else on the internet, alone and/or with online friends. So you could say adults are being "coddled", in a sense, by themselves.
It seems possible to me, in fact likely, that kids going outside less is responsible for reducing the accidental death rate for kids in the same way that fewer adults going outside is responsible for reducing the accidental death rate for adults.
You have to avoid noticing your kids biting each other or fighting. If you see the kids behaving dangerously you will be emotionally compelled to action. The kids must be out of site. Its the only way.
Great review! Given my own ~5 months of experience with parenting so far, I think I would not have liked this book--Glad you could give me some analysis of the highlights instead!
A couple comments I had regarding parenting time:
1) Even the Wilken and Cullie graph has mothers and fathers only doing a combined <800 minutes ie. 13 hours of parent-child time for 0-year olds. Who's looking after the baby for the other 11 hours??
2) These graphs seem to be depicting only the parenting time where the parent is actually looking after the child... What about:
- pumping time. That alone is like 4 hours a day. (If you're like me, you can't look after the child while pumping, because you need to be constant massaging for the milk to flow.)
- washing and steam-sanitizing bottles and pump parts
- washing poop out of onesies when diapers leak (so that when you put it in the laundry, it doesn't get the entire load of laundry poopy)
- figuring out if the problem is your own low supply, your pump being inefficient, or your baby's poor latch, etc, figuring out how to use a pump, figuring out what it is that makes a hospital grade pump better (whether it's worth renting one), finding out where to rent one, driving 2 hours each way to pick up the rental pump.
- figuring out whether pumping is even worth the hassle. (Bryan Caplan would probably say no, since no parenting things matter apparently, but that Belorussian study you cited in the biodeterminists guide said possibly 6 IQ points! That seems like a lot of IQ points. Also it reduced the chances of SIDS! Even Bryan Caplan has to admit that that matters, right?)
- figuring out what to do about the measles outbreak. (Apparently getting an early extra dose before 8.5 months reduces the efficacy of later doses, so that in the long term, your child ends up with less immunity than a child who didn't get an extra dose, but getting an extra does between 8.5 months and 1 year has no downsides afaik?)
- also reading up on the spread of the measles outbreak with dread as it creeps closer to your county
- figuring out whether all the stuff going on at the FDA would have any effect on the safety of the formula you're buying
- reading about SIDS. waking up on a cold sweat and having to check that baby is breathing and then not being able to fall back asleep and reading more about SIDS. trying to buy a baby heart rate/oxygen monitor, reading about all of them, and getting choice paralysis about it, and not ultimately buying any.
- trying to figure out if you might have post partum anxiety or something. Trying to look up if there's a therapist covered by your insurance who can help you figure this out, calling a couple, and getting overwhelmed and giving up (but anyway it's not anxiety if there really is a measles outbreak in your state, right?)
And that's just based on five months of parenting! I've been told it only gets scarier from here.
Although I will say this: For me, it's so worth it. Having a baby has kind of magnified all my feelings somehow, like, yes, the stress, the despair, the exhaustion, but also the joy, the love, the love, the love. (Not just for my child, too! I always loved my husband, but I somehow love him so, so much more now, seeing his love for our child, our family.)
I'm only 2.5 years into parenting, but I think babyhood was scarier.
Re: screens, my two year old is allowed the phone but under the following conditions:
1. Absolutely no shorts/TikTok/etc. if he watches something, it's age appropriate cartoons like Bluey and so on.
2. He can only use our (parents) phones, will not get a tablet for himself. This takes care of him having the phone for too long, since then our own addiction kicks in and we want it back, or he loses interest.
I find this setup to work pretty well. He likes to watch things on the phone, but he also loses interest and gives it back relatively fast. And it works wonders if for example you are doing groceries on your own and he decides that right now is the time to run away screaming. I find the biggest challenge to be with myself: since it is a tool that works so well, I sometimes need to fight the urge to give it to him just because I'm tired and not feeling parenting at the moment... Thankfully I succeed the majority of times.
Not a parent but I was a child whose parents tried to keep him away from computers and limit his screentime, which was infuriating and I did act out pretty bad a few times because of it. Am I addicted to screens? I mean, I spend ~14 hours a day looking at screens, I figure that's as addicted as they get. The thing is, I'm a programmer... I kinda feel like, on some level, not becoming addicted to screens was never an option for me? Even as a kid, I knew this was going to be the thing I wanted to spend my life doing. - Of course, I'm saying this on a website where everybody knows each other from online. Would I have more IRL friends with more screentime restrictions? I kinda feel I got all the IRL friends I could reasonably expected to get at school! I went to their homes and stared at screens there.
I don't have any social media or gambling apps on my phone. I'm not sure if that's a difference in quality? I get my intermittent reinforcement the old-fashioned way, checking for story updates to the dozens of fanfics I'm subscribed to. Is that the same as TikTok? Is the level I'm at simply exactly the correct level and the problem with kids these days is just that they're beyond it? Thing is, if I had a phone in school I'd absolutely parse as "phone addicted". Since I didn't have a phone in school, I just fell asleep in class or stared out the window not paying attention. I'm not sure if that's supposed to have better outcomes?
"Same as it ever was, but 30% more intense"? Or maybe my addictions and tendencies worked out because my environment was just less optimized? Maybe it's a thing where with the superstimulus environment, as a kid you're always courting ruin and being courted, and it genuinely matters whether ruin has a 40% or 60% effective sales pitch. Maybe we need to outlaw phones with bright colors and excited voices in advertisements. Just degrade its ability to make war to 1990 level.
Did you mess about with computers as a kid, or were you too late for that?
Because it seems like the phones would not create the same caliber of digital natives, in the way that most of us cannot do any work on our modern cars.
You're saying like, "yeah I got got pretty hard, but as a side effect I developed a useful skill, and that's what we've lost"?
I don’t know that you suffered any damage at all - - just suggesting that there might be a difference between “screen time” and its potential in different eras.
Scott, you are correct in that you are not overwhelmed by 2h of childcare but by the rest of the day.
> When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
A good solution for you would be to set clear boundaries and get out of the house to work, even at the "cost" of taking on more than 2h (to make things fair for your wife). E.g. take care of the kids between 7-8/9, then go to a coworking space or (much better IMO) rent a small office 10 min away from your home, then come back at 6. This nets you 2-3h of actually caring for your kids, but your time away from them will be much, much less "overwhelming". You can still come home in 10 min if something happens that requires you.
I think daycare is also an excellent solution that will be beneficial to you and your wife, and that you are overestimating the effects of disease (not saying that you won't get sick, just that the benefits outweigh the costs).
"if you kept your kid away from phones until age 18" (here I wanted to put the "laughing so hard I'm crying emoticon 3 times", but I don't know how to do it). Love the way you casually write this as if it were in any way physically possible... We managed to hold off with both our daughters till 13; they were, ostensibly, the last ones in their class...
I grew up in rural Canada and my back yard was literally a wilderness filled with bears, mountain lions, etc. Our mom sent us off into the woods from lunch time until dinner and in the meantime had NO idea where we were or what we were doing. And she was a stay-at-home mom. Buuuuut, there were 4 of us... so my two bits on a theory about this is that, since people had more kids, they were slightly less anxious about them (ie. they figured if by some slim chance one of them got eaten by a bear (or kidnapped by the white-van guy), they still had 3 or 4 left, so no biggy). Now most of us have 1 or max 2 kids and we are hysterical about keeping them safe and making them successful (I'm absolutely guilty myself of this). So some kind of a manifestation of our drive to keep our genes alive? Less offspring = higher level of care and vice-versa.
Final thought: Scott, you mention being overwhelmed by your kids at the moment, and I can only say (now that mine are in their late teens), that the day will come when you will look back on the chaos and the exhaustion and you will wish so badly you could be back there again...
"he day will come when you will look back on the chaos and the exhaustion and you will wish so badly you could be back there again..."
Not necessarily. I think it depends on your personality.
I have a teen and a pre-teen, and they're so much easier and more fun at this age, and I'm continually grateful that the baby/toddler years are over, especially whenever I see (or read about) other babies/toddlers.
But I know there are some parents whose favourite part is the baby or toddler stage, and once the kids are past that stage they want to have another baby to recapture it!
Can you say more about why you think it’s physically impossible to have a teen without a phone?
A facsimile of my child or baby is in my dreams sometimes. It is so bittersweet, though as with all my dreams it is always "off" in various ways. These dreams replaced the old ones where the child was in peril, through mischance at a distance from you somehow and you needed to get him back; which themselves replaced the ones where you were trying to find a class in a confusing building, that you had missed out attending and now there was a test, and you weren't even sure of the subject.
Perhaps in time I will stop dreaming of him too.
Yesterday evening, my twelve-year-old daughter looked at me and my wife through her big round glasses and explained to us why it would be better if the year had 13 months. "I've done the calculations." Each month would have 28 days and would begin on a Monday. The extra month's name is Omtomber.
What I mean is that the first year (or, uh, three) is hard. But it does get easier and it is worth it.
Thanks for the shout-out. Our two kids were raised about as free-range as possible. My wife and I live way out in the country on lots of land with deer, porcupines, bears and groundhogs galore. The kids grew up digging ponds, making forts and finding snakes. The eldest didn’t get a phone until she was 13, but the phones are still like crack. We are about a pro-education a household as you could imagine, and neither child is interested in academics. My experience as a parent is that I apparently have very little influence and who your child turns out to be is like Forrest Gump’s chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get.
I expect the reason most kidnapped kids get returned is that most 'kidnappings' are estranged parents violating custody agreements, not white van men picking up children to whom they are total strangers. My guess is most white van man kidnappings go less well, sadly.
I’m sure you’re right. It also makes me think, is there a name for this phenomenon? The typical rape isn’t a stranger in the dark, it’s ’we were on a date and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.’ The typical murder isn’t a well-thought-through Agatha-Christie gambit, it’s ‘interpersonal violence can be unexpectedly deadly.’ Something about crime being typically more like ordinary behaviour gone wrong than something alien to everyday experience.
The advice that got me through my children's childhood was from my laconic brother-in-law with three kids: "You must learn to differentiate between what is dangerous and what is life-threatening".
Plus, after year 3 things get easier.
So you have only 2 more years to go.
Parent of two teenagers here. I tell everyone who asks that parenting is both the easiest thing, and the hardest thing, you will ever do. The big stuff is easy: kids tell you when they are hungry, if you changed the diaper incorrectly, etc. Kids are, to a very great extent, self monitoring.
But it's also the hardest thing I ever did, because at no point was I ever in control. They tell you what they need and want, and you respond in the moment, because you love them, the little bastards. I was a stay at home dad, responsible for the majority of the childcare in our household, and early on I realized that I just had to let go of control over my daily schedule, because the kids were in charge of that.
I had help (four in-laws, all of whom were wonderful). So there were times I could just drop them off at someone else's house overnight, and that was wonderful. My wife and I became skilled at detecting when the other one was at the end of their rope, and take over the childcare for the day. "Go away" she would say, and I would, coming back several hours later when I was more relaxed (by which time she needed spelled).
I was a proud helicopter parent. At no time before the age of 14 were they ever alone without one adult's eyeball on them (assuming the school was doing their job properly). They received no electronic devices before that age (actually, we experimented by giving my oldest in 6th grade a phone--it didn't work out, so we took it away).
It probably mattered that my kids didn't have many friends growing up. They weren't esp. isolated, I don't think anyone's kids did. That just isn't what they do now. So they wanted by attention, and by and large I gave it to them. When they gradually began pulling away, I let them do that too. The kids are in charge, even if I never let them know it.
My oldest had a mental illness--so my experience may not be typical. Bu they are both independent now, and I am very proud of them.
I think every child is different, and you give them the attention they need. Try not to stress over how stressful it's going to be. And by the time they are 18, you will wish it could last a little longer.
"last a little longer"
Indeed. I was very young and learning about being adult, when I was a mother. Always trying to demonstrate that I could care for my child and also keep a nice home on a dime, and earn what was essentially just spending money through various dumb part-time gigs; and cook all our meals, and learn all the crafts, etc. Later I wished instead of mopping the floor, I had played with him more.
When it's over it can seem like they never were.
I think the answer to the past and theoretically to the present is simple, but also often impossible. More kids!
Imagine it's 1960 and you're a mom of five kids born over 10 years. Your 10-year-old has been helping with the little kids for several years and is responsible enough to keep the youngers entertained reasonably safely. The 8 and 6-year-olds can at least help with the entertainment and keeping the littles from getting badly hurt. They can come find you if something bad happens. Even the 3 or 4-year old can help keep the smallest ones busy and don't need quite the level of care that a baby or toddler does. That doesn't mean leave your 1-year-old with your 3-year-old while you go shopping, but quite likely does mean they play together while you cook lunch.
Similarly this works with neighborhood kids. I would be far less comfortable with a hypothetical 7-year-old wandering the neighborhood alone than with that very same kid traveling with a pack of kids within a few years of his age.
If I'm right, what we might see in the data is more time with kids (total) in 1960 but a lot less time with each individual kid. We're taking the work away from older kids accidentally by not having a lot of younger kids for them to be around. I used to know a lot of families with 5-7 kids, and they seemed less stressed than the families with fewer kids. Families with just one kid seem by far the most stressed about raising them. I have a nephew who is an only child, and he craves/needs validation from his parents constantly. He struggles to entertain himself. In past generations he might have been better off by playing with neighborhood kids, but apparently Steam/Xbox relationships don't meet the need. So they both spend huge amounts of time with their son, maybe more than they would total with a few kids who are around the same age entertaining each other.
Of course, toddlers are their own thing. They're hard to take care of when they're mobile but can't communicate and especially when they have no concept of social rules or boundaries. Our daughter used to run towards the street a lot, for like, no reason. So we couldn't let her play outside on her own for even a few seconds. Our youngest stayed where he was supposed to, so that worked a lot better. He also had two older siblings to follow and learn from.
Yeah you should let your kids fight.
Admittedly I have a small sample size. But in my experience there is almost no downside to letting small children fight. They can't really hurt each other very easily (they're too small, and they usually aren't really trying to hurt each other), it seems to be a very natural behavior, and it tires them out.
You do need to make sure the area they fight in isn't dangerous: no sharp corners where heads might intersect, no heavy or fragile things that could be knocked over or fall down, etc. Provided you've done that I wouldn't intervene unless someone started crying or couldn't breathe or something.
A big part of this is that, as you've probably noticed, it is REALLY EXPENSIVE to prevent kids fighting. There might even be some learning benefit, but that's getting into bolder claim territory and like I said, limited sample size. Maybe you could ask this question on your next reader survey? "Did your parents let you fight?" Honestly if I were in your position my reader surveys would be nothing but "what did your parents do and how did it turn out"
I recall riding with my cousin in her giant SUV, the children in their car seats in the 3rd seat, and her daughter yelling to her, of her little-more-than toddler brother - "Mom, he's trying to get a piece of me!"
It was a kind of play, especially given that they were trussed up in booster seats.
Ah, well, I see that you do in fact ask parenting questions on the survey. One of these days I will learn not to comment midway through the post.
I kinda feel why are the options
1) No phone.
2) Algorithmic rubbish.
Why isn't there some edu-phone option that allows some stuff and blocks other stuff?
Lots of questions about where exactly to draw the line.
On one extreme, there are lecture series on quantum mechanics that are definitely educational not brainrot, but also aren't that interesting to most toddlers. On the other extreme, baby shark.
But theres plenty of stuff in between.
You could take a phone. Leave the camera, clock, calculator etc apps on it. Add a few puzzles. (eg a sudoku ) Add a selection of music, nothing too inane. Maybe add one of those easy learn to program things (like scratch). And that's it. No internet connection. But still pretty useful.
> What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds? They can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they?
I have 4 children, 6 5 3 1, and my wife & I rarely do "primary childcare" for the 1 year old. Certainly no more than 1 hour per day. She roams freely through the house and watches life happen. She has a nanny during the week (our only childcare) that takes her to the park, library, and so on in the mornings, and who then clocks out after her nap. We obviously have to change her diaper, give her a milk bottle, and feed her in a high chair with the other kids, but she is very much along for the ride. Her physical well being just isn't much work at all. The marginal work she has added to our childcare approaches zero, and she is doing great.
Regarding screens, the 2 older kids have iPads only loaded with things I'm happy to have them use (e.g. Synthesis). They use them for about 30 minutes, 4 days a week. We don't bring iPads out of the house to restaurants or on outings or anything. It has been extremely easy to control kids screen-time.
Generally speaking, leaving kids alone in their play room or backyard to play is a common thing which is good. Doing that does not require direct supervision or involve letting them run around the neighborhood. The oldest (6) already gets himself home from the park (about quarter mile) on his own, across several streets.
Parent of a 3yo and 8mo
My most successful approach to this question has been figuring out ways to make the time I spend with my kids more enjoyable. This boils down to a few things:
1. Prioritize activities you both enjoy: sounds obvious, but if you are spending time together either shift the activity to something you like or try to find something enjoyable in the activity your child is doing. For example, I enjoy playing with legos (even Duplo), so we do a lot of that. When my child wants to draw, I use it as an opportunity to practice drawing kanji. Etc. When you do activities you both enjoy, your child will have more fun too because you won’t be sitting on the sidelines waiting to move on to something else.
2. Related to 1, but make a sincere effort to be present. If you’re really in the moment, there are more opportunities to see beauty and joy in the everyday and mundane. If nothing else, you can turn any activity into good mindfulness practice, making it feel like time well spent.
3. Find ways to not have to be “managing” your kids constantly. I find parenting most exhausting when I am constantly trying to redirect them away from something bad. On the other hand, when we’re in an environment where they can do what they want safely, I can relax and enjoy. In practice, for the 8mo this looks like spending time to make a baby safe play area, for the 3yo this looks like having bright-line rules about what is acceptable/negotiable/prohibited so we don’t have to spend all our time arguing plus some basic discipline moves (1-2-3 Magic) when he wants to push boundaries.
I live next to a public park/playground, and from spring to fall there are a dozen or more kids playing there unsupervised, almost all the time outside of school hours. Of course that still isn't that many - public census shows that there are a few thousand kids within the neighborhood - so most parents aren't taking advantage of this pretty simple opportunity (there are a few other public spaces nearby where kids are playing but nowhere near the several thousand that live within walking distance).
What age are the unsupervised kids?
Probably 8-15 year old. So fair point, it's not as simple with younger kids.
It's interesting you mention the Roman Empire collapse due to decadence. Dwarkesh recently put out an interview with a well respected historian who argues that changing climate, failed harvests and diseases were the main reasons why the empire fell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFzgSmN8Ng8&t=340s
Not that this impacts the broader point. I agree with it - each new change in society needs to be evaluate on it's own. We can't generalize from the past.
I definitely believe that the smartphone and social media destroy attention spans. I used to read novel after novel as a child. I could finish a short novel in a day or two. Now I have to work up the effort to read for up an hour a day and it takes me 1-3 weeks to finish an average length novel - even one that I'm genuinely interested in.
I'm not an expert on this or anything but it's one of my hobby horses. In my view the disasters were all exogenous shocks that a healthy system should have been able to handle. Plus you'll note that plagues *help* Malthusian societies: 14th century Europe experienced an abrupt rise in living standards post-plague. The third century crisis was immediately preceded by rampant hyper-inflation caused by debasement of the currency. Basically the economy went from free-market to a tax-extractive one, and that's probably downstream of crumbling political institutions. Plus I mean just think about it: every ancient culture had to deal with the same environmental problems. The reason it hit Rome so hard was that it had become sclerotic and fragile.
"Also, I married the only centrist-classical-liberal woman left in the San Francisco Bay Area - what kind of off-the-chart-outlier genes did she need in order to pull that off? If my son inherits those genes in a male body and moves to Chicago or something, will he become the next Costin Alamariu?"
Congrats on making me lol and sob at the same time!
BTW, I met your wife at an ACX meetup and I can confirm that she's super nice. It was funny: I show up at the meetup, I see mostly men and a woman sitting by herself, so I sit next to her and start a conversation. After a while I ask her, "Almost no women here other than you and me, what brought you here?" And she smiles and says, "I'm Scott's wife." And I'm like, that'll do it!
Anyway, on to Caplan's book: Color me unimpressed for two reasons.
You gesture towards this in your piece, but I call BS on "low-effort parenting" until the child is at least 3. Newborns, babies and toddlers don't give a damn about your "free-range child" philosophy or the norms of 1950s parenting. Caring for a baby looks like this:
1. Baby goes "Waaah!" you drop whatever you're doing/awake from your nap with a start and rush over to baby.
2. You attend to whatever baby needs - diaper change? Rocking to sleep? Feeding? Burping?
3. When you're done with the above, you put baby down in their bassinet/crib and drag yourself back to the ginormous pile of dirty dishes/laundry/trash can full of dirty diapers you haven't had time/energy to deal with.
4. You say to yourself, "F**k it, I'm exhausted, I'm just gonna close my eyes for a minute, I'll take care of the dishes/laundry later, or husband can do it when he gets home from work,"
5. Return to step 1, wash, rinse, repeat, and oh yeah, do it all while desperately sleep-deprived.
Also, major side-eye to Caplan for simultaneously being like "taking care of children is super easy, barely an inconvenience!" and being like, "if you find a childcare too hard, no problem, just spend more on nannies!" Yeah, no kidding, genius, of course childcare is easy if you have the multiple tens of thousands to throw at childcare, the most Baumol-cursed part of the economy there is. Plenty of people don't have that luxury.
Is there any research on hours spent by parents on childcare for East Asian countries. There is a stronger expectation of grandparent participation which I expect would lower the averages.
To the behavioral geneticists who say we should all calm down, contrary to some social criticism, most of the work of parenting is not nurturing them to better adults, but direct care-taking: feeding, clothing, putting them to sleep, and getting them from place to place in the moment. How do you cut this?
Man with twin 1 year olds wonders why his parenting experience is harder than the median :D
Given that he has a nanny and his wife does most of the work between the two of them, his parenting experience shouldn’t be that hard, no?
I was 4 minutes into reading this thinking how blatant it is that Scott is the author of this review and he didn't even try to mask it before I realized that it's a BOOK review and one of his regular posts.
You might not want to hear this but: more kids! 3 is critical mass where when they are just slightly older they will entertain each other!
For me, the SRTHMK is not about saving time spent with children. Rather, it relieves my worries, that I say one wrong word and my kids will need to pay a therapist 20 years later as a consequence. Or ruin their health forever by a wrong choice of their childhood diet. Etc.
>"KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW! I’M TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON HOW EASY TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN IS!"
While this was funny, I think this review and, seemingly, the comments are missing an important and very pertinent part of Caplan's argument (IIRC). Namely, that the costs of childrearing are frontloaded and the benefits are delayed.
Infant children require a high amount of parental investment. Young children require a moderate amount, and adolescents require a small amount. Adults, and grandchildren, don't require any. But, if you ever stop by a retirement home, you'll notice that old people really, really like having grandkids to fuss over.
So, I don't think Caplan was denying that raising infants is a lot of work. Rather, there are ways to more sharply level off parental investment as the kids get past infancy, and many people underestimate the long run returns from having kids (and grandkids).
Child raising can be a lot more scalable than it is, especially in "secondary" modes. Different "nuclear families" could pool their children together, as a sort of unofficial, unregulated "playcare". And once you have older children, you might be able to get them to help you with the younger ones (even if only grudgingly). And then there's the aspect of "free-ranging": I guess I kind of had that, as I grew up on a farm where I spent a LOT of time alone, yet fortunately experiencing sufficient interactivity with others to learn human language and stuff (I had especially good relations with my extended family).
the free range kids...look Caplan, I was one too, and there is a reason why Gen X became helicopter parents. We kind of lived through some stuff that we don't tell people nor does it show up in data. Not everything bad is "missing on a milk cartoon bad."
"Oh, he's playing over with the neighbor kids, it's ok." Yeah, 8 year old me is seeing boobs for the first time watching police academy in the basement because they had HBO. Think we told? Hell no.
"Oh he's out riding his bike," yeah here i am being ringed in by neighbor kids in their bikes because they hated my face for some reason, and being worried they'd pick up stones to throw at me. Stones hurt, Scott. Kids are not nice by default, they learn to be, and they can be very cruel.
The silliest memory was going to my mom's friend from church's house and playing with their kids, who proudly showed us their ersatz porn of the land o'lakes girl done by taking the carton, cutting out her bare knees and transplanting them as makeshift breasts. 40 years and i still laugh/cringe at this.
those were mild things, there were worse that happened to me. And i was a boy, a lot of this doesn't think how harder or more dangerous it is for girls and women. keep in mind, not everything is told or shown in data.
I think Caplan needs to remember he is no Studs Terkel. Economics is not sociology and you cannot make it such. Sometimes you can only ask a particular person how it went for them, and they may not be able to say any more than "such was life."
Do you think 8 year olds today, even those without their own phone, are not seeing boobs, and much more explicit stuff?
i think parents have more control over their kids, yes. If you are giving them
unfettered internet access that's being careless. Kids services and restrictions exist.
the point is more free range kids generally also had pitfalls that don't show up in data, and parents often don't see that. its not sunshine and roses, and helicopter parenting kind of resulted from growing up knowing that.
> Still, age one is too early to try this; my kids would still run into the street if we weren’t there to stop them. Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.
They did! They had lots more kids, and the elder ones (especially girls) were expected to look after their less-independent siblings. So really you only had to go through this with the very first kid (and not even that if you could rely on nieces or cousins) and ended up doing a lot less per kid.
(At least that was how it happened in Portugal. I assume in the US there might have been relatively fewer kids, but probably still enough for this effect to be relevant)
I find it hard to believe that even in Portugal you would let a three year old take a one year old for an unsupervised walk along a road.
1. In the countryside (which was most of Portugal proper until at least the 1960s) cars were a rare sight back then.
2. Keep in mind by age 4/5 kids would be expected to do light work (shepherding or picking fruits). (I don't think I'm misremembering the ages here as one of the reasons parents used to dislike primary school was taking children out of the fields where otherwise they'd be working. I could check later though)
3. Even in a big city you'd probably have this with 5yos, which doesn't change the stats much if you're having 10ish kids and so are your 10ish siblings
Well, there were a fair number of cars in the US even in the 1950s. And Scott lives in an urban area, presumably urban areas had cars in Portugal in the 1950s too.
4/5 year olds are very different from 2 and 3 year olds. A 5 year old is developmentally advanced enough where they can keep their mind on "I have to keep this 1 year old from running into traffic." A 2 year old or even a 3 year old just doesn't have the attention span for that.
No argument that older kids had to do a lot of supervision of younger children in those days, but until the eldest of your 10 kids hit that age of keeping a thought in their brain for longer than 25 seconds, someone had to keep them alive that wasn't your previous child, simply because at 2 or even at 3 they are just not capable of doing that job yet.
In Portugal in the 1950s I assume multigenerational living helped a lot. In the US, I'm not sure.
So your counterpoints made enough sense I went and actually asked my grandmother, who raised a small number of babies in the second biggest Portuguese city in the 1960s.
1. She says her firstborn was left with a "nanny" from the moment she had to return to work (unclear exactly when, but I'd estimate about 4 months after birth) until the age of 3.
2. This "nanny" was apparently a woman who worked at home as a spinner while simultaneously "supervising" between 10 and 20 kids from the neighborhood.
3. After age 3 this firstborn (a girl) was left at home with her baby sister. From what I could gather they weren't left alone all the time straight away, and for a while my grandparents worked weird hours to ensure one of them could be home a significant amount of time. During this transition period the eldest was being taught house skills so they'd do some chores while my grandparents were away. Memories were fuzzy but from what I could gather this period shouldn't have lasted longer than a year, and could have been shorter.
4. The kids weren't super safe in the house, especially while cooking. There appeared to be some assumption that neighbours would notice and perhaps intervene should anything truly serious happen. There was at least one episode when the two girls were seen operating some sort of fryer by a neighbour who thought they were not safe doing that. Said neighbour told my grandparents as much, but didn't stop them using the fryer and even had a bite of what they were making.
5. There was a TV in the house, and while there was only one channel there were some popular cartoons (but no soap operas until after the Revolution in 74, I think). They would certainly spend some time watching TV, but presumably not more than a couple hours daily unless they really wanted to watch the news or whatever grown-up programming the regime allowed during the day.
6. By the time the eldest girl was 6 the kids were doing daily cleaning and preparing the family's evening meal.
So in the end... I don't know, maybe there were such "neighborhood nannies" in the US at some point wherever relatives couldn't do that?
That's really interesting! Thanks for checking in with your grandmother, even if all the particulars are not correct due to age and the passage of time, it certainly paints a picture. It sounds like a tough life for both her and her kids.
I think a lot of what you say kind of jibes with what I'd expect -- you wouldn't leave a 2 year old alone with a baby, a 3 year old is still iffy (as is evidenced by the fact that they had to structure their work in such a way as to not leave the kids totally unsupervised just yet).
Totally unsurprised that the kids were not safe at home. In my own family (Russian) there is the story of a relative who had to leave a young child at home alone and burned their hand on the stove in order to scare them from touching it when the parents were not home.
I'd imagine in the US the "neighborhood nannies" were a thing for lower class families, but probably not middle class. To bring it back to the original topic of the post, some superficial googling shows that in the US in the 50s, only 16% of mothers did not stay home, so I think that if they were spending less time with their children, it probably wasn't because the kids were with neighborhood nannies.
Out of curiosity, do you know if your grandmother's children were formula fed?
Thanks!
I suppose everything is relative in the hedonic treadmill! Their life was certainly tough compared to my own and my children's. But it was not particularly tough for their context and it was probably better than my other grandparents had going in the countryside, despite children having been less disruptive to their routine there.
I'm not sure what to make of this 16% statistic... I suppose in a way it's a sign of prosperity that so many mothers didn't have to work to keep the family afloat. Who knows, maybe the real trick was actually a drop of spirits in the dummy, or hitting children if they were too much work.
I forget the details, but if I recall correctly my grandmother didn't breastfeed or formula feed everyone. But health issues may have played a role there.
If the number of children being kidnapped has remained the same but the precautions parents take to avoid kidnapping have increased by a large amount, doesn't that imply we live in much more dangerous world today?? Kids would have been so much easier to kidnap in the past, you have to do something very high risk, like pick a kid up off of their front lawn to kidnap a kid today. Perhaps the neurotics are right and it is a lot more dangerous for children out there today?
It's probably because most of the kidnappings are by relatives, who tend to know the child's schedule and are otherwise able to get access and convince the child/others that the child should come with them
Maybe I'm being redundant (sorry, didn't read all 600 comments) but the usual answer I see to "Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be."
would be a couple of tricks:
- Older siblings/neighbor kids looking out for younger kids. This still works in rural Mexico and hunter-gatherer societies, apparently. And
- Most of the moms in the neighborhood knowing each other through the local parish or the PTA or what-not and putting other people's kids in check if their behavior gets too far out of hand. In other words, a sense of communal responsibility for the neighborhood's kids that would step in to prevent vandalism or serious violence. I think you can still find this in some Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. Free Range parenting is also very popular among Utah Mormons. Might be interesting to see if they have carried on this communal responsibility approach.
Stay strong. Age 1 is the hardest!
Re that map of freedom:
When my father was 12 or thirteen, he conceived of a desire to ride his bike to his grandmother’s house.
306 miles away. (Via current highways, there was no interstate then so it would have been longer, most probably, but the roads also quieter and less fraught.)
So he and a schoolfriend did this. They did indeed carry a letter from his mother, that sufficed should anyone question them. He is hazy about where they slept, but this was long before the days of lightweight camping gear so they wouldn’t have carried tents and stuff. They may have just stopped and rested at rest areas. Maybe got a then-cheap motor court room.
A pal, a couple years younger, joined them on the other end, for the return trip, which he said was much harder biking into the wind. He recalls them trying to lighten by jettisoning their stuff, books he’d carried, and a “beautiful lady’s hand mirror” which his pal, the son of his mother’s best friend back in her hometown, had apparently been made to take so as to groom himself nicely. Also unclear.*
After 10 miles or so, the pal got to worrying he shouldn’t have thrown away his mother’s hand mirror and wanted to go back for it, and this occasioned their only quarrel.
I think he didn’t much want to ride a bike after that little adventure. So on the basis of his extensive paper route, he went to the bank - a competitor to his father’s bank - and got a loan for $300 and bought a car.
At 14.
*The hand mirror has puzzled me, about this anecdote. I’m thinking it was just an ordinary drugstore hand mirror, but perhaps gilt-painted, so that in the boys untutored eyes it was valuable if pointless treasure.
> Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds?
Low effort hypothesis for the One Weird Trick.
Stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions, and start beating your kids up instead!
Regular physical discipline seems like it might have been an efficient tool of managing children that went out of fashion since 1950s.
Not sure how one could test this: maybe compare total childcare time with countries where physical discipline is still common? E.g. single-child two-parent households in the U.S. versus similar PRC households?
> Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds?
Low effort hypothesis for the One Weird Trick.
Stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions, and start beating your kids up instead!
Regular physical discipline seems like it might have been an efficient tool of managing children that went out of fashion since 1950s.
Not sure how one could test this: maybe compare total childcare time with countries where physical discipline is still common? E.g. single-child two-parent households in the U.S. versus similar PRC households?
I don’t think you can get much out of physically disciplining a 1 year old.
I've often assumed it's a consistent incremental risk preference. If the odds of all cause mortality for a 5-10 year old are 60 in 100,000 in 1950 and you allow or deny your child to undertake activity X which increases or decreases their risk by 6 in 100,000 then you have adjusted the risk of catastrophe by 'only' 10% of total risk. If the odds in 2020 are 10 in 100,000 then the same refusal improves your odds by over 50%. If there is an ongoing risk reduction over time (driven by societal factors or broader health improvement or whatever) and each parent responds to the prevailing rate, then specific actions become 'riskier' and the reward for further constraints becomes 'greater'. This doesn't require any change in relative risk preference across that period, and the effect could be triggered entirely via improvement in very basic health and safety (e.g., vaccines reducing death from disease, seatbelts reducing death in car accidents).
In the above scenario the important claim is that the perceived risk of X has not changed. This is not a Weber's Law scenario in which people 'notice' risks they would not have before due to lower background risk rates. People in 2020 do not incorrectly believe that these activities are more dangerous now than they were for their predecessors, and predecessors did not ignore the risk or believe the risk levels to be lower than they actually were. Nonetheless, since in all periods the function at play is incremental risk mitigation the reasonable decision to make regarding X can shift.
More welfare grift.
Why on earth would the number of stranger kidnappings be 10x higher than the reported figures? Am I misunderstanding?
Is it unreasonable of me, as a mother of two under three, to not believe that Bryan Caplan spent twice the time his wife did with their kids per day when they were toddlers?
Or, as someone who works outside the home and employs a nanny, not to believe that his children only spent 1 hour per day with their mother?
TBF Bryan Caplan has also written about how his job only takes like 25% of his time lol. He’s sort of a SAHD
1 hour per day is still really low.
My only real issue with this article is how he described the work it takes to raise kids. This could be just wealth envy. But its quite difficult to hear someone who has a nanny and a wife describe it as exhausting. Overall good article.
'Kai' in my language (Yoruba) literally means 'stop' or 'don't do it'. The first context you used it with uppercase style literally had me initially reading the word in my native tongue before I corrected myself.
I'm deeply skeptical of the idea that nothing you do can matter for your child's outcome.
Compare Victorian vs. modern Britain. Educated Victorians explored the world, conquered the world, astounded the world with their groundbreaking science and industry. They were proud of Britain, proud of themselves, ambitious. Modern educated Brits - the same people who ruled the world 150 years ago - get performatively angry about right-wingers getting angry about nationwide immigrant rape gangs.
Even if you thing this is a positive change, the change is still there.
Does this really have nothing to do with education and upbringing? If you got 5000 British families to LARP 24/7 as Victorian elites, instilling Victorian virtues and ambitions in their children, sending them to schools with the same curricula as 19th century Eton and Cambridge... would this not produce a radically different outcome for the children of the 5000? Even if it were just one family, if they produced a compelling enough narrative, could that not affect their child's future?
There's really no unexplored world left to explore and conquer (space is prohibitively expensive and also dead). Where would you expect them to go? Frontier science and engineering are just way too hard for most.
The post hints but doesn't state that there are selfish reasons specifically to have more kids closer together rather than spaced out.
There are economies of scale: fewer total years spent juggling infant/toddler care with work, better sibling synergy, and fresh memories of overlapping phases (vs. restarting from scratch after forgetting how exactly you gave birth or fed an infant in the first place). Infection risk works like this, but moreso. The whole household gets a huge health boost from keeping the whole brood out of institutional care until everyone ages out of immune fragility on one end and/oor starts to hit compulsory schooling age on the other.
So quick, chat me up about methods before the baby wakes up!
My mother has said that the explicit goal around 1960 was "3 kids within five years".
It feels very right to me to have a big kid and a little kid. Like that was part of the wish of kids (Kinderwunsch), the sibling dynamics, the different stages at once. The experience of having a family and growing it. Everyone benefits.
"If you ask parents whether they’re happy, you get different answers depending on what exact framing you use; it’s kind of a tossup"
Yes, I've always thought asking parents if they regretted having children (if that's the work you're alluding to) was actually asking parents if they were prepared to admit to others that they regretted having children. A totally different question. If I had kids I would never even admit to myself that I regretted them cos I wouldn't want to go down that road.
Glad to read this, I was in the same situation a year ago - rereading the book that convinced me to have children, in hopes that it could tell me what I'm doing wrong with my toddlers. I used to quip that I've just worked a hundred-hour week, a hundred weeks in a row... but now that was sixty weeks ago.
How has the past year treated you?
> Sometimes I would not want to hear terrible nursery rhymes and would turn it off. Big mistake. My son would scream at me until I changed my mind; eventually I stopped even trying.
I don't know if you've read the parenting literature but the big mistake you're making here is failing to "control the environment". You don't turn off the keyboard in front of your son. You disappear the keyboard while your son is sleeping so they can never play with it again.
And yes keeping screens away from toddlers seems like an important part of "control the environment" to me. As a compromise, we do allow listening to audio books over a smart speaker. For some reason that seems to be much less addictive than screens.
We're wired to get 90-something percent of information via or eyes, so it totally makes sense. Also, even smart speakers are way less interactive, especially for a toddler
>But for the Straussian interpretation, check what town is in the upper right.
Huh.
So I guess your takeaway is "let kids roam free, unless there is a large Pakistani population in your local area"?
R.E.: laptops. My girlfriend was in a lecture a couple of years ago, and during the lecture the professor received an email from one of the students in his class. He stopped the lecture and loudly announced "please stop watching porn".
One of the students in his class was literally watching porn on his laptop during the lecture.
I think Bryan Caplan should win the Thomas Malthus Award for Making an Correct Societal Theory Exactly When It Stopped Being Correct
I will never understand how the Bryan Caplan who wrote a whole book about how children will turn out basically the same no matter their nurturing somehow decided to homeschool all his children and pay for expensive 1:1 tutoring. It’s almost like he doesn’t actually believe his own book.
I don't believe childrearing ever was much easier in the past, though secondary factors (more tight-knit communities, lower standards, etc) might have made it somewhat more so for the average mother.
It's hard. It's as hard as it can be without bringing us to extinction, which you would expect of a species with no natural predators.
It's hard, but it passes.
When they get older the work becomes less direct care (thought that doesn't go away if you want to bond with and educate them), and more organizational. I spend a lot of time dealing with schools, camps, extra curriculars, playdates, doctors, therapists, household management, grocery shopping, meals, etc, now than I did when they were babies. These are things that are hard to outsource, because we have preferences about them. Granted, I am dealing with children with special needs, which complicates matters significantly, but I think a lot of this is baked in. Bryan Caplan would probably say none of it matters and just let them veg at home on their devices, but I think he is just wrong here.
I also second the response that toddler + phone = nightmare. I could go on a long rant about how each of my kids responded to various technologies - but the short version is touch-screen very very bad, computer better if supervised (IE, no YouTube holes), and TV/Nintendo least problematic of the screens. We have a system where they need to earn screen time by reading, writing, or cleaning, and this has been working reasonably well.