My friend's son (in NY) also used to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the subway map and start listing all the stations at random times in any conversation (also, whenever he was actually on the subway). Sadly he's since grown out of it.
I don't think it is? Like, other than the names being one letter off, there's no particular resemblance between the two series; I don't think there's anything in Map Men that's playing on Mad Men.
Also, I'm not talking here about the fact that Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper started a series called "Map Men" on Jay Foreman's YouTube channel, which dates back like 10 years; I'm talking about the fact that Jay Foreman recently renamed the *channel itself* to "Map Men" in order to better promote that one series.
I was going to say. I feel certain Scott knows about this and must have decided not to comment on it for the sake of whatever narrative he was constructing.
I mean I once saw a poster at the eye doctor that said to get your kids tested for their vision because 1 of 2 people have blurry vision and they won’t know until you test them.
It seems plausible to me that if people can’t even tell their vision is near-sighted, other less obvious things about your experience of the world would be even easier to miss.
i would not be surprised if at least 90% of rationalists are autistic. But since everyone is, then I could see it being weird to turn it into a *thing.* But also from my experience, a lot of people in nerd communities genuinely don’t know it about themselves. Many of them think they have OCD, or have no idea why their insomnia is so bad.
It’s funny, I think a lot of what rationalists have built for helping to navigate the world (updating your priors, for example), are genuinely helpful things for autistic people, and that should be more widely known.
(I have been working at an autism clinic for the past year after getting sick of corporate work so I have some basis for my opinions, but I’m not always right either)
As a kid, I couldn't tell my vision was near-sighted because only one eye was really bad, so I compensated with the other eye well enough most of the time. It ended up well enough that I just assumed everyone's vision was like mine!
Then we visited a science museum with an exhibit on eyes that had a vision test, and I wanted to check it out (like everything else in the museum), so Dad got to see me roundly fail the test.
So firstly, even if we assume 4 exclusive choices of interests, we should point out the obvious error in Scott's thinking, which is that his son inherited his same interest genetically because he is the male child. Obviously there are gender related differences that tend to emerge in general in people, but Scott would have to have way more children to determine to what extent it is gender-based and to what extent it was random that the interests of his children lined up with the genders of the parents. As counter examples, my dad was the one who understood me the best (I am a woman), and with the toddlers that I have worked with, I have seen girls who are interested in trains and boys who are interested in music.
So if we expand out the sample size to 2 children, one of whom had a shared interest with the father, it suddenly seems less likely that trains as a specific interests was passed down, but rather more the trait for intense interests was passed down, and the son happened to develop the same interests as the father. In fact, in terms of combinatorics and assuming 4 distinct interests that are equally likely, there is a 3/8 chance of one child having the same interest as the father while the second has a different one. It is thus not strange statistically to see Scott and his son share an interests.
Trains tends to develop as an interest for many people because it combines spinning (wheels), cause-and-effect play, things that follow a predictable pattern, they are large and visually interesting, and there are lots of variants easily available for kids (toy tracks, thomas the tank engine, train parks). Likely the train obsession in Scott's son was not borne out of nowhere, but after being exposed to train toys.
Music actually tends to be another really common interest.
Only if you think trains are the only possible thing that could fit the other descriptors. Even if you can’t think of any other thing, including availability as a reason is still allowing for the possibility that something else that fits the other descriptors could theoretically exist.
As an illustration of what I mean, if you assume the average person tends to like sports for various reasons, then it would not be circular to say that Americans tend to like (American) football because it is widely available in their country, while English people tend to like soccer because it is widely available in theirs.
My boy/girl twins just turned one and I can't wait to experience this. Too early to know for sure, but seems like we each got a little version of us <3
It's funny how kids comply with rules sometimes. I have twins. We taught them they had to hold our hands when they crossed the street. They interpreted the hand holding as the important part and started crossing the street holding each others hands. Thankfully, nobody ended up getting hit by a car so I get to smile while I tell the story.
I had that same confusion for years, but I think as a mark of a future rationalist I was mainly consciously confused rather than assuming my Dad was horribly breaking the rules.
I thought "driving without a license" meant that you went to prison if you lost your wallet and got pulled over. I believed this much, much later than I should've lol.
Hah, I'm glad I'm not the only one. My mother still likes to tell the amusing anecdote of when I was like 5 years old and started scolding my dad for drinking the coffee he'd just picked up at the McDonald's drive-thru.
When my mom paid for something & got change back , I thought the cashier was giving her back money because she had paid the wrong amount. I felt embarrassed for my mom.
My nephew went one better on this and decided it was valid to hold his own hand through the parking lot. (I blame Miley Cyrus.) Thankfully, this innovation was also detected and reproved before he got hit by a car.
It is, indeed, very funny and nice, actually. Always enjoy these sorts of updates. You've got to have Something To Protect.
In the vein of daydreaming about epsilon-probability things: I think wanting to roll the dice and see what character sheets pop up for progeny is not a particularly pure-hearted motivation for me to want children, but an honest one at least. (Narcissistic, maybe? But then why inflict children on the world at all if one doesn't have a decent level of self-regard?) Absent actual cloning, it's just really difficult to come face-to-face with accurate representations of one's self. Certainly I find myself ruefully laughing at the cosmic joke of Turning Into My Parents, despite spending young adulthood vowing that'd never happen. Can't break the chain, for better and for worse.
I'm basically an anti natalist, but I also recognise that the anti natalist arguments will probably only work for those who should not have kids. If you love yourself and life and the world, and think your kids will be happy and have a positive impact on everything, you'll just think the antinatalist argument is ridiculous. I think if one is to have kids, although I fundamentally disapprove, they probably should be a little full of themselves.
Caplan's book that basically says "don't you worry, genetics trumfs all, your children are going to turn a lot like you! :)" like that's supposed to be uplifting?? I do NOT want anyone to have a psyche like mine.
I'll literally start seeing a glass as 'one-third empty' when drinking something. I was a teenager in the 90s and was paranoid about the draft. I majored in a STEM field because if I failed and had to do education, there was a shortage of teachers in those subjects at the time. I picked a career subpath with the highest returns to *mediocrity*, because I didn't know if I'd be good or not before I started, right? I never dated until I was almost 30 out of a combination of fear of harassment accusations and divorce settlements, and before I started dating I went to the men's divorce firm to tell me what to look out for. I would stay in relationships I disliked for *years* because I was afraid the person would try to smear me if I left.
All of these things sound totally normal, plus or minus a mild anxiety disorder, and some of them describe me also. I think you should get treatment for anxiety/depression, and if you don't want kids, you're fine, but this is hardly "let the curse upon my bloodline die out" levels of bad. You can probably even genetically select kids for low internalizing behavior now if you really want (I can't remember if that's actually on panels, but it will be soon).
I'm 47. There's really no point at this point, those sperm are riddled with errors and I don't think the extra IQ points are worth it. Plus I'd have to date *substantially* younger, and only the top tier of men can do that--my net worth is seven digits, not nine.
But, y'know, thanks for the vote of confidence. And yeah, I think being able to genetically select out depression etc. is going to help a lot of people in the future!
You are making the ethical assumption that "normal" people should have children. I don't think so, I think even people with mild anxiety disorders probably shouldn't. Neuroticism is a curse.
Scott beat to me to it, but I was going to suggest embryo selection might be helpful as well.
I have mixed feelings about some of my own genetic endowments but the other side of me says at least I'm not a clinically BPD fentanyl junkie knocked up with three kids before age 25.
Some of these things might turn out differently in your kids due to environment and randomness. And if you have a kid with your exact problems, you'd be in the best position to notice and ensure that they get addressed. I hope you manage to address them as well!
I used to feel that way myself, and I still don’t particularly like myself. The loneliness in the midst of others has always been, and still remains, very tangible to me.
When I was 21, I had a sort of girlfriend, more out of mutual desperation than anything else. We were incompatible in every conceivable way, but her own longing - among other things, she kept birds, and sooner or later they all flew out the window and died in the Norwegian climate - led her to stop taking the pill. So I became a father before I turned 22.
At first, I was devastated, but I immediately took on the full responsibility. There was no alternative. Before long - in fact, quite quickly - I realized that this little being had everything to teach me, and I her. Looking back, it is clear to me that no one has taught me more about how to be in the world than my own children. Without them, I would probably have gone under quite quickly. To put it in perspective, I have attended more funerals after suicides and overdoses than I have weddings. That is kind of sad.
Later I had more children, this time with a good person who, cliché as it sounds, complements me. She is, for example, exceptionally good with other people and possesses a remarkable social instinct that will always remain a magical mystery to me. Together we have created our own people. In a way, she probably didn’t need that, considering how effortlessly she gets along with others, but for me it has been essential to be able to spend my life with more functional versions of myself—people with whom I genuinely have something in common.
The symbiosis of learning continues, and I honestly don’t know who grows more through the relationship: me or them. My eldest daughter turns eighteen this summer. She has just returned home after a year as an exchange student abroad. Her friends here cried with joy when she came home, after she had cried with grief over having to leave the new friends she had made. These days we mostly see each other for dinner, when we’re out practising driving, or at BodyPump every Tuesday. She is becoming an independent person.
Yesterday my youngest daughter wanted to go skateboarding, so we went to the skate park. Afterwards we had ice cream and read a book together—perfectly sensible things to do on a summer’s day, if you ask me.
Cute, happy for you. But all you describe of yourself is that you're a little more socially awkward than your current partner and feel a bit lonely. Some of us are mentally or physically ill, or just highly neurotic, and I don't think we should pass that on just to get personal fullfilment through parenting.
In the nineteenth century in Norway, there existed a registry of families believed to suffer from hereditary insanity. The most distinctive branch of my family was recorded there. Many of us descendants still carry a fair number of mental challenges, even though the disease-tainted blood must by now be thoroughly diluted; nevertheless, most of us manage reasonably well and live fairly ordinary lives, tending to the garden and such.
Moreover, I read in the memoirs of an ancestor that the male line of this family was also marked by making exceptionally good choices of wives. Probably just boastful bragging
If you look at how people actually come to have kids or not, you'll be quickly disabused of the need to be pro- or anti-natalist. It's entirely unrelated.
Also, your bit about Lyra being the IT twin made me think of my own twins at that age; I always had the Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities" in my head because "you've got the brawn, I've got the brains; let's make lots of money" was absolutely how they operated.
Seems pretty plausible there is something pretty close to a gene for train obsession. It does seem to be a pretty strong interest for many people with a certain kind of aspergerish vibe (vibe .. probably not that much to do with the medical diagnosis but you know what I mean).
Uhh why is that pathologising it? There are plenty of genes for good things -- be it trivial like eye and hair color or more significant. I'm pretty glad I have the standard human version of foxp2 not the earlier one most great apes have.
If I thought that kind of aspergerish vibe was bad I probably wouldn't be reading this substack.
This does make me wonder if the claim I heard that people lost a lot of appreciation for how much is influenced by genetics when families stopped living in the same village might be true.
I'm sure that affected how they viewed differences between animals but people always tend to believe that for some reason what they see in beasts doesn't apply to people. If you have family members living near each other you are more likely to notice correlations.
Of course you may get plenty of false positives too because of cultural factors but that depends on how much variation there is between families etc.
Do you mean contemporary people, or those from the pre-industrial era? If the latter, then I would say that they had much stronger (and more accurate) opinions on biological inheritance than the former. The literature of the time (and even from the 19th century) often throws up examples of "the importance of breeding" in defining human traits.
I meant the pre-industrial ones. And yes, I agree but the possibility I was raising is that this was because they saw enough human breeding to see that human traits were very heritable.
Had those people lived in a world in which people moved as far from home as they do in the modern world -- meaning you very rarely saw grown members of the same family to compare -- I don't think they would have just assumed that people must be like the beasts. Maybe they should have but I think people are pretty willing to assume we are unlike the other animals unless forced to confront it.
Two more bits of parenting technology that have come in handy with handling these sort of negotiating dilemmas for our kids (3.5 and 2):
- Offering special reasons when the usual rules are broken. For example, there's (sometimes) a kiddie train at our mall that our kids want to ride every time they see it. We go there frequently enough that if we let them, the price would far outpace the value of the experience to them (but they wouldn't naturally temper their asks, because they don't understand the cost side of the equation). But the one-time value exceeds the one-time cost -- if we were on vacation, it would be a no-brainer. So we needed to find a way to limit the frequency, without subjecting it to a negotiation. Enter my parents: Our rule is that they can ride the train when they are visiting, but not when they aren't. Plus, it gives them positive associations with their grandparents!
- Offering weekly or monthly rhythms. Weekly rhythms becomes natural once preschool starts, which in Singapore is at 18 months, and they start to cherish weekends, like they'll do for the rest of their lives. For monthly rhythms, after she turned 3, we started offering our daughter monthly 1-on-1 ice cream dates. This doubles as an incentive for her to learn the calendar, as every time the month changes, she knows she can ask to go have ice cream again!
Those ages are a bit young for an allowance, they are more likely to eat the money than hold onto it, and they won't really understand what it means for the money to be gone and will still want to ride the train. Plus, if they get attached to the money and you try to take it to pay for the train (even if they just asked to ride it), you will have a whole new screaming experience. A virtual allowance, where you keep the money for them, is beyond their understanding and you will appear to be capricious rather than consistent which entails further screaming. We started giving our son an allowance at 5 and it's still not uncommon to find the bills crumpled up and forgotten in an odd location.
Right now all he wants to do is save it, I think he values having it and receiving it more than using it. It's a fairly small amount of money each week, and I think he is imagining buying something really cool eventually but has a hard time with choice paralysis. The allowance is a bonus rather than a replacement of us buying him things, so he isn't deprived or anything like that. My wife loves it because if she wants to shut something down she can just tell him to use his own money.
But also, wow, very relatable. I was just like that too, and I regret it. Arguably I'm still like that, but the future is uncertain. You should let him know that the marginal utility of money will vastly decrease in the future and the optimal strategy is consumption smoothing. I wish someone had told me when I was young. I thought I was so wise...
Yeah, they’re too young for a fully fungible allowance, but I could imagine kind of coupon system — “This special paper entitles you to one train ride” also working as a bridge to an allowance. Later stages could involve coupons that are good for multiple things, so they have to decide which they want.
A banlist is hard to maintain. Unless you somehow could exhaustively list all disallowed purchases (highly unlikely, and difficult to communicate anyways), it has to be constantly negotiated over, and the whole point of this was to limit the need for negotiations. An explicit allowlist is much easier.
>>I might never have noticed this if I’d only had girls. I love my daughter, but I’ve never been a little girl; it doesn’t bring anything back for me.
Not necessarily true! One of my two daughters, gender aside, is an exact copy of me down to the type of little-Idiosyncratic-quirks-that-seem-impossible-to-be-genetic mentioned in the article.
Yes! I have two daughters, and there are some ways in which they're both like my wife and not me, and plenty of ways they're like each other and not either of us, but if there's a trait shared by me and one daughter and not my wife and the other, odds are rather strong it'll be me and my eldest vs my wife and my youngest.
Curious about a small syntactic mention that you and your wife share different rooms?
I just moved in with my partner of a few years on the condition that we maintain separate bedrooms. I was wondering if this is a reasonable thing to maintain up until or after marriage. It just never felt correct to me that an adult couple with sufficient means should automatically always have to share a bedroom, I bargain that it could even save many a relationship.
Yeah, we have different rooms and have continued to do so after marriage. We're both introverts and light sleepers, and both keep (often desynchronized) weird schedules.
Great post. Qq, I remember you said in another post that you are really adverse to lying. You don't consider it lying telling your kids that 2 minutes have passed when they haven't?
More generally, how acceptable do you think it is to lie to children?
For context, sometimes when I offer him five minutes he'll say "No, two minutes!" because he thinks two might be larger than five. I don't think he has a well-calibrated sense of what this entails such that I am betraying him by not living up to it.
I, for one, would have felt betrayed by something like this, at least once I got to the point of understanding it. Don't you think he'll someday read this?
I don't know how old your kids are now, but when my stepson was age four plus a few months, childhood amnesia kicked in. It was quite remarkable. One week, he was fondly remembering all the fun things he did with his daycare teacher (whom he loved), but within a space of about two weeks, he had completely forgotten her and the rest of his pre-four-year-old life. I had made a point of talking about her frequently to try to keep those memories intact for him. We had photos of her, and he no longer remembered who she was after this inflection point.
You might want to keep an eye out for this occurrence in your kids. It would be interesting if their brains do their synaptic pruning* of their younger memories at the same time.
Also, the same daycare teacher I mentioned above said she'd ask her kids who they were in their previous lives (she'd phrase the question something like, "Who did you use to be before you came here?"). She said about half of them would give her some very detailed stories about who they used to be before they "came here." My ex was kinda shocked she was doing this. But I was woo-woo enough to appreciate it. My stepson didn't display any memories of being anyone else, though.
It would have been interesting to record these utterances.
The Department of Perceptual Studies at UVa has been studying kids who make statements about their previous lives for a long time (50 years +), and they have aggregated a massive cache of several thousand cases, plus the relevant methodology. This isn't something you can reproduce in a clean room within tightly controlled conditions, and to reduce accidental contamination of the utterances by leading questions etc. is quite important, even though the hard-core skeptics will simply laugh anything off.
That said, I still suspect that this phenomenon is much more widespread than just "thousands", and your daycare teacher's record goes in that direction. Most of the West (with some interesting exceptions such as Iceland or Scottish Highlands) considers reincarnation "woo-woo" and people really have to trust you before they tell you that their kid speaks of a previous life. No one wants to have their kid labeled as a freak, mentally ill or just crazy, and other people are really cruel in this regard. (If anything, the cruelty became even worse with social networks.)
A case study: one of my friends, a fairly materialistic doctor, has two daughters. The older one made several spontaneous statements matching the life of her long deceased grandmother. Not just that, her personality is basically a carbon copy thereof, very untypical for that family, and she has acted "adult" when she was very young. Too adult, I would say; she was basically unmanageable by standard parental means as young as three or four, having her own judgment and following it regardless of threats or punishments.
The catch: not even her father, ex-husband of said friend, knows about those statements. He was never much into parenting, and she didn't tell him, precisely to save the kid from mocking. I might be the only person beside her to know, because she trusted me a knew that I am interested in such phenomena.
I've had enough weird stuff happen to me that I'm no longer persuaded that physicalism can accurately describe the entirety of reality. I'm perfectly willing to accept the phenomenon known as reincarnation. One doesn't have to posit the existence of souls to come up with scenarios that could lead to us having other memories.
Sure, we don't know much about the underlying mechanisms.
That said, almost all such kids talk about their memories in first person ("I was, I did, I had, I lived, I died"). I only remember a few exceptions from the published cases, and even those were IIRC mixed (e.g. using the old name in third person, then switching to first person). That consistency at least hints at something.
There are studies on identical twins who were separated as newborns, and they indicate that they have the same jobs, hobbies, food preferences and even their partners tend to look and behave very similarly. Why not trains then.
>The twins have usufruct rights to one cup of Gatorade every morning.
I am confused. WP says that usufruct does not include the right to destroy the thing, but presumably they drink it.
>Also, Tocqueville argues that the replacement of the ancient system of fair feudal privileges and duties with one of authoritarian enforced obedience led to the French Revolution, and I’m not sure what the parenting equivalent would be but it sounds bad.
I mean, the obvious fictional example of this not turning out so great for the parents is the Gasai family from Mirai Nikki. I didn't go quite that far when Mum stopped feeding me, but I did physically fight her and lock her out of the apartment (and then run away after she had the police yell at me for a couple of hours).
It is bad. Relationships never fully recover from something like that.
Such a wonderful post. I also have twins (and another child) and it's very special to see two children to be so different while so close in age (one of my twins is a copy of my sister).
"(I use the term “parenting community” loosely; many of these people have no children of their own, just strong opinions on how other people should raise theirs)."
In my experience, the opinions of non-parents on how to raise children were about as useful as advice from virgins would be on how to have better sex.
Gotta admit, more than a few things sound familiar coming from a family with mild heritable autism. I have a hypothesis that some things are easier for kids and parents when both are *just* enough on the spectrum to understand what the other is doing and why.
Side note: that crib looks kinda similar to the one I and my brother had as a child except ours had a bar missing leaving a gap *just* large enough for me to slide out if I needed to.
Apparently my parents first tried turning the missing bar to the wall but that led to my brother climbing out a bit like your own little one.
They decided that leaving a route to escape was safer vs him climbing over the top and turned it back.
I have very early memories of the rules about when I had to stay in the cot till. Though they were suspended at least once when I was scared of a storm.
So just to say that if you worry about him falling while climbing out like that then removing a bar or 2 probably won't cause chaos.
Speaking as someone who is not even a little bit autistic in a family not even a little bit autistic who has three not even a little bit autistic kids—this is all very familiar!
The part where you have to act as a tyrannical dictator has always been one of the main things I find off-putting about the idea of being a parent. Nice to know less autocratic, more ...uh feudal arrangements are possible.
There are many parenting styles and "tyrannical dictator" is but one. I would say the vibe in our family is something more akin to "hope and peace and love and trust".
It's usually hard to be true absolute tyrant. Unless you're a true superman, you still need to negotiate sometimes. "Rules for Rulers" is a good CGP Gray video about it, but I'm very sure that he has changed the title to something incomprehensible by now.
Too heartwarming dammit! Fwiw I'm an even more permissive parent, to a fault, certainly, and not the only one, with three adult data points and they're all totally awesome. As far as I can tell no trace of those faults made it through, almost like they raise themselves..
"(also, he has no concept of time, and if I say “two minutes over” after thirty seconds then he’s none the wiser. I try to not to exploit this loophole for personal advantage, but it’s a good lever to have in a crisis.)"
There never was a crisis so dire I would have had my parents lie to me like that, but I suppose it's theoretically possible.
Being a parent of young kids really helps drive home how many layers human culture is built on that adults just take for granted. Here's an example that might help illustrate: Counting.
My kids each learned the "counting chant" fairly quickly: "One, Two, Three, ..." They would sometimes skip numbers, and couldn't always pick it back up if you said something like "What's after seven?" But they mostly got that part down some time between 18 months and 2 years old.
You'd think that would mean they can count. Well, it turns out that learning the numbers is only the easy part of actually counting. The hard part is making sure you say exactly one number for each object. For this, it helps to point at each object and enunciate clearly, pausing for a little between numbers and objects, but you have to make sure you don't mess up and speed up the pace of your counting faster than the pace of your pointing, or vice-versa. This requires much more intense focus throughout, as any slip-ups can very result in a miscount.
And that's still only if the objects are neatly ordered, like cars in a row in a parking lot. Counting objects like the number of blueberries on your plate requires you to carefully keep track of which blueberries you've already touched and which you haven't. Maybe you can move them from one side of the plate to the other, but that also involves enough dexterity to be able to do that. And sometimes you can't, and you just have to visualize in your head what order you're going in, which isn't easy at all.
And that's just counting, something we all probably think of as super elementary!
What happens when you try to trade with them? Like say, I'll give you two of my yellow candies in exchange for one of your blue candies or something like that
Maybe you're a parent and this has worked for you, but for a lot of people find that the "why not treat children like they're rational actors like you'd treat an adult" strategy often runs into the problem of "children aren't adults and are rarely rational", and often just have neither the temperament (and perhaps not the cognitive ability) to respond to that strategy.
There's a section in Emily Oster's "Cribsheet" that I think of:
> When I misbehaved as a small child, my mother’s solution was to ask me to “sit on the stairs and think about it.” I would toddle off to the stairs, sit for a while and contemplate my wrongs, and then return to explain what I did wrong and that I would not do it again. My mother congratulated herself on being an amazing parent who was deeply in touch with her child and didn’t need to resort to the kind of “Go to your room!” discipline that others practiced.
> Then my brother, Stephen, arrived. He did not want to sit on the stairs and think about it when he misbehaved. In fact, he loudly refused. Things escalated to his being sent to his room. Also refused. My mother found herself physically carrying him to his room, shutting the door, and holding the door closed with all her strength while he screamed and tried to get out.
> Which goes to show, again, that parenting is much more about the child than about the parent.
And yes, some people only have (or were) the first sort of child, and assume that the second child's behavior is some failure of the parent, (which is part of how parenting debates get so toxic - people assuming approaches that worked for them will generalize)
Thanks for writing this. These types of posts are always some of my favorites. I desperately hope I'll get to experience it someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, but I'm not optimistic.
How does this stuff work genetically? It can't be that the son inherits much more of his dad's genes (and vice versa for the daughter), right? Is it that the same genes are expressed differently depending on the sex?
Some strong traits are just very sex-chromosome dependent. I have two sons, the first one takes after me, the younger after my husband. But the first one is not quite like me: e.g., he's not as shy and cautious as I am, because this is a strongly female-coded trait and he just isn't female. Also, he has my body type and facial features, and looked very much like me at 5 when he was 5, but now at 15 y old, of course, he doesn't, for obvious reasons.
The part about Hiawatha made me remember Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, one of my favourite bits of Swedish literature. Has anyone read the English translation and knows if it’s any good?
Ronia robbers daughter!!! Read it in English as a kid and thought it was great. What about it reminds you of Hiawatha though? Maybe I don't remember it well enough
It’s no deep comparison or anything because I’m not too familiar with Hiawatha. But Scott gaining new appreciation for it as a parent made me think about how I’m sure the father/child relationship in Ronja is received differently and with renewed depth as a parent vs as a child.
This is so very cute. I have a daughter and already it seems like she inherited my family's musical nature.
Also, I know you just said you get way too much parenting advice, but the advice I've heard is that if a baby is climbing out of their crib, it's time to switch them to a mattress or toddler bed before they hurt themselves climbing out.
I assume children must be highly variable in how likely they are to hurt themselves while climbing. I climbed a lot and very carefully when I was younger, and adults who didn't know me getting concerned was a continual annoyance.
Yes this is very silly advice for parents of little monkeys who climb in and out of their crib with complete ease. If they're happy in it and have demonstrated proof of their climbing abilities, leave it be, I say.
It's very hard to reassure parents of the other type of kid that yes, I know my kid is up there and no, I am not rushing to bring him down. If my climber kid jumped off a swing set, oh it's just another Tuesday. Friend less than a year younger copied the exact same jump and fractured an ankle. This is a regular type of occurrence with the two of them. Some kids get frequent flyer miles at the urgent care, others just land on their feet like cats.
My son's favorite, third favorite, and fourth favorite toys are all trains and his favorite videos (with the possible exception of Wheels on the Bus) are railfan train clip compilations. Sometimes I will boot up California Trains 1 Hour for him and he will object because he wanted Amtrak Cascades New Livery (I think that one is his favorite because it looks the most like his beloved stuffed Amtrak). Sometimes he sings the Brown Bear, Brown Bear song but replaces several of the creatures with "choo-choo". Our local feudal law entitles him to at least one of train pants and a train shirt, but the second piece of clothing can be non-train-depicting if all the train pants are in the wash.
Why yes, my husband *is* a huge train nerd, funny you should ask. (It might not be entirely genetic. The stuffed Amtrak was a Christmas present before the obsession kicked in and the relevant uncle is justly smug.)
I wasn't a trains kid, but I did a lot of similar things — like trying to write a 2000 page magnum opus about the history of the world, all of science (literally all of it), the city where I was born, the town where I then lived, and the city we were moving to.
I also fondly remember deducing the addition tables before I was old enough to read.
My dad had just finished working as a doctor, and so he would routinely diagram and explain organs for me as a bedtime story; unsurprisingly, I wanted a science textbook (one for eighth-graders) for my fifth birthday. I never did become a scientist, though.
Hey Scott. Long time reader, first time poster! One question I had was whether you still plan to home school your children? I think you mentioned this before your children were born. I have to say it was the only post you've ever made that filled me with horror - mostly because I tried it out of necessity during Covid and found it very tough! I was wondering whether your opinion had changed since, and if so, what changed it or reinforced it?
OMG, your story of being in the paper punched me in the face. Our son was written up in a half page article of La Repubblica for his knowledge of the local transit system. He was completely obsessed with it and would carry maps. When we'd go to the city center, he'd see people who looked like they were confused and would approach them. We'd always have to assure people that this 9 YO really did understand which bus to take.
I thought that he was interested in the buses/trains themselves and we tried taking him to the meetings of the local transit aficionado club (e.g., they fix up and obsess over old trams and such). He patiently sat thru a meeting or two with the middle aged men, but then admitted that it was the system with which he was obsessed.
You've nailed it with seeing echoes of yourself, or maybe someone else in the family. He is a mosaic of our loved ones, and yet shockingly unique in unpredictable ways..
> I thought that he was interested in the buses/trains themselves and we tried taking him to the meetings of the local transit aficionado club (e.g., they fix up and obsess over old trams and such). He patiently sat thru a meeting or two with the middle aged men, but then admitted that it was the system with which he was obsessed.
Oh, this is really interesting to me, because I always felt kind of the same way -- I never had anywhere near the intensity of Trains Interest that some people are describing here, but also, the Train Fandom failed to engage me in part for precisely this reason. I didn't care about the trains themselves, it was the system I was interested in.
Yeah, he comes at the world orthogonally to my approach. For instance, he used to play a lot of online Pokemon. He'd get into adult tournaments and would do very well (he got banned when one guy he beat in a tourney dimed him out for being underage). I thought it was him being competitive. Turns out, he enjoyed winning, but he would spend more time building and playing with "meme decks" where there was some constraint or theme that he was forced to conform to. For him, turning a system inside out and understanding how and how far it can be pushed is deeply satisfying to him.
Frankly, we are just happy that he is so passionate in a world where it is all to easy to be a couch potato consumer.
This is great, except for the part where you're still on Twitter, for some reason. That's something I've yet to understand about the world - everybody agrees that """social""" media are unambiguously awful, and yet they can't seem to avoid being there, something I've never had a slightest temptation for. But then again, I also don't like alcohol and gambling.
I don't think there's any equally good place to get AI news, and I feel like it's important to participate in discourses that might otherwise end up with everyone believing various lies and using them as excuses to coordinate against good causes.
Yeah... It's the duty of good people to throw themselves into the meat grinder to slightly influence its outputs for the better. I can admire the spirit, even while doubting the wisdom.
My 4 year old also has many signs of having OCD. At first we were very accommodating to his irrational behavior, but then after doing research, I found studies like this one that showed that family accommodation for children was correlated with worse outcomes and higher symptom severity as an adult. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19309195/. I could see this being reverse causation, but in the abundance of caution, I have been a lot less accommodating to my son, which causes him and my acute stress.
As a psychiatrist, you’re much more qualified to analyze the studies than I am. What is your take on the literature on how to best treat pediatric OCD? Is this perhaps worth a Much More than you Wanted to Know article, for the sake of both of our children?
I don't do child psychiatry and haven't looked at those studies. My intuition right now is to not lean into it, but also not make a huge deal about trying to fight it. I joke about OCD but I think that young children are also pretty weird and I don't want to leap into medicalizing it.
Yes, our oldest child at age 2-3 insisted on a certain bedtime routine that included counting to three while tossing his blanket over top of him, singing a certain song, etc. That went away by age 4 and he hasn't had any comparative particulars pop up. At 8 he still likes routines, but to a normal degree.
I even remember as an older child, I played mental games that involved always stepping with my right foot first when getting up or crossing thresholds or rounding corners. It went away by my teenage years.
Likewise I had what I would now consider weird and wacky habits and priorities as a teenager and 20-something. People are people at all stages of life, and some of those stages are weird by the standards of other stages. I don't think any good would have come from pathologizing it in my life.
Great stuff, man does not live on AI safety posts alone.
Regarding toddlers and their inability to tell time--I used to compensate for this by using a timer. But then the kids demanded a timer for every little thing, and I felt like I was conditioning them to obey a machine instead of trusting their dad that time's up. Now I use event-based timing (one more book, one more slide, etc) and it works pretty well.
My kids are also obsessed with timers, so much so that if I bring in a timer because they're fighting over a toy, they sometimes start fighting over the timer instead.
Our kids also are more inclined to listen if a timer goes off than if we just say "time for bed", or "time to stop playing on the playground and go home" or "time to stop watching TV (at the grandparents')". I'm okay with it -- the point we're usually getting across with using a timer is that the timing is a deliberate decision, not just a suggestion to be discussed, even if technically, I just set a 5-second timer on my phone when I realized we need to go. It's the mechanical equivalent of switching to a stern and serious tone.
I know you try to avoid writing too much about your kids, but I love these posts, and the pictures are adorable.
Also, you should have gone to school at Georgia Tech. They sell train engineer hats in the bookstore. You could have worn one on campus as a student and no one would have batted an eye.
The one that got me was babies/kids in horror movies suffering in some way. I always used to think of it as the most boring component, always thrown in there and totally meaningless because it was so overdone. Then I had kids, and suddenly the screams of agony of a small child would bring up a deep sense of dread from the core of my being. Sure, it's still overdone, but I can see why they reached for it now: you can't avoid that feeling once you are a parent because your kids seem like they are actively trying to kill themselves with their blatant disregard for personal safety, and so that internal sense of dread sits there, waiting, permanently attached to your subconscious.
On a completely different note, I'd recommend some form of sound machine for you and your children. It can really help mask small household noises that would otherwise wake them up and trigger the screaming, and for yourself it can also mask a bit of the thumping in the night that children seem to constantly emit. I'm convinced a lot of cases of "ghosts" in the house are just people with kids, we've had cases where it sounded like one of the kids fell out of bed, a big thudding crash, then we'd check on them and everyone is totally fine, snug in their bed and fully asleep. The downside is you have to start carting a handful of sound machines with you on every overnight trip, but I consider it a small price to pay for that extra bit of sleep.
Why is there such negativity about old age in Western culture? I think many poems such as the first one here, teaches kids that. Stories they hear as kids shapes their views. I was talking to an Indian Muslim friend about stories she heard growing up. It was about Islam being the only good way. Hindus don't believe they have a monopoly on the truth, so the stories our kids hear reflect that. There's no concept of supremacy.
All jokes aside, this was a very beautiful and heartfelt piece, and as a parent and Orthodox Jew (who went through a religious crisis during the Slate Stare Codex days), the last line was especially meaningful.
You've got a pretty good description here of the Kingdom of Heaven!
You start by pointing out that as we get older, we tend to be unhappier. Children have a way of looking at the world that is full of joy and wonder. This perspective seems to enable them to be happier. Then we get older, and by accumulating experiences, our anticipation becomes constrained. The end result is that we stop feeling joy, and the world stops feeling magically coherent, bound by principles that meet our true needs.
Your kids, meanwhile, continue to see life itself as if it ought to make sense.
Not in the sterile mathematical sense of "there's a single causal model that can i understand and learn through evidence" but in the more human sense, of "there are rules governing the world; the rules make sense and are just." The question "See nana, two minutes?" comes from that expectation of cosmic justice bumping into the adult understanding that no, sometimes we live very far from people we love the most.
As adults it's easy for us to imagine that we're more right than our children. We probably all assume by default that a child's expectation that his grandmother's presence would follow the same logic as bedtime is an error. That we know better. The child doesn't understand that nana lives far away, because the child is ignorant of reality.
But what if we're wrong?
What if our certainty in our ability to understand the world is a form of delusion, one that harms not by giving incorrect anticipations, but by reducing our ability to trust, and thus enjoy, life itself? What if 'see nana two minutes' is a reasonable expectation in a world where family structures took priority over economic ones, and your children's intuitive expectations line up with the cultural forms necessary to actually propagate themselves through time? What if our children's 'naive' trust is fundamentally more wise than our attempts to measure and control everything? What if our attempt to use mathematical models are not different from a child turning his head to see train tracks everywhere, because he likes that combination of power and precision?
This is one of the best things you've written lately, maybe because it sounds far more like a child expressing wonder and joy than an adult expressing certainty and pessimism. It very funny.
Also, I have definitely heard the sentiment from Song of Hiawatha expressed many times before. The one I remember most is from sportswriter Bill Simmons; of David Letterman's retirement to spend more time with his son, Simmons wrote "You begin your life and it’s exciting, and then it starts to get boring, and then your kids show up and you get to relive everything through them."
At the time I thought this statement was somewhat pathetic; a decade later when I had my first child, I saw a lot of truth in it.
We're big on Game Theory in our house. Every decision is evaluated not on "what's better right now?" but on "what incentives will this produce?". Because we generally maintain bright-line rules, life is generally okay.
But if the parents go on a trip and Abuela comes to take care of him... we get to a glimpse into that other, alternate, lawless universe. IN a surprisingly short amount of time, he learns all of the emotional-manipulation tactics, including tantrums. For a few days after she's left, I have to apply the rules especially rigorously (and/or with threat of punishment should he fail to comply), so that he remembers that the Sheriff is truly back. Once that's established, we can revert to our normal mode.
"But I know that if I did it once, every future time I refused would get treated as a violation and penalized with screaming."
My wife's parents watched the kids ONE TIME while we went out to dinner. The 2-year old told them "I don't want it" regarding the peas in his mac and cheese. They let him pick out the peas, put them on a paper napkin, and then throw them in the garbage.
It took an entire month to get him to accept green vegetables again.
They also agreed when he said "read again" after his bedtime story. At least that one only took a few days for him to get over.
I'm still not convinced forcing kids to eat their vegetables is utility maximizing. I really hated it. It is not an exaggeration to say it permanently damaged our relationship. It was such a terrible feeling, the disrespect of basic autonomy. It's crazy when you think about it, that's it's so normalized to do things to kids, who mind you are plenty old enough to think of themselves as people too, that would be downright abusive to do to an adult. The case for vegetables, against a counterfactual of supplements, fruits, and vegetables in more palatable forms, isn't even that strong, considering how uncertain nutrition science is. I suppose it makes more sense for parents who value their own convenience over the basic human dignity of their children. Many such cases!
As a parent of a very picky eater, I think you may be overlooking a basic fact of life:
If you eat no fiber whatsoever, you will suffer horrible, painful, health-damaging constipation.
It doesn't necessarily have to be green veggies, but they need to get it from somewhere.
Some of ours refused veggies, fruit, and even supplements. Extremely hard to feed.
We try hard to respect our children's autonomy, and allow them to negotiate when they have constructive suggestions or arguments, but we also set pretty firm boundaries when they refuse to ingest any fiber.
I was saying that I've personally had children who fought hard against ingesting any source of fiber.
Not that you need to force kids to eat a particular dish.
In that scenario, to keep the child healthy, the parent needs to find a way to get the kid to eat fiber.
Different approaches do a better or worse job of respecting the child's autonomy, but in the end it's still true that a responsible parent won't allow the child the radical freedom to suffer the dire consequences of severe, unchecked constipation.
I mean this extremely warmly and kindly - I think this is perhaps the most universally human thing Scott has ever written. All parents know these dances, and it's one of the biggest unifiers on the planet.
I'm going through IVF treatment and every time I read something about parenting, it fills me with joy. I can't wait. Also, my wife and I will *absolutely* talk in toddler phrases. 😂
More broadly, thank you for writing honestly and beautifully about the experience of being a parent. There should be more of this in the discourse.
Are your kids old enough yet for Ticket to Ride: First Journey? If not, surely they will be soon, and this seems like the most obvious birthday gift ever given the whole trains thing.
Also, all discussions like this about apples not far from trees make me think of board games, because my wife and I met in 1996 playing Die Siedler von Catan with a crappy bootleg English rules translation because the real one hadn't come out yet... and when we had a son we joked that we were making a third for board games... and now we have the sort of son who will discourse at astonishing and confounding length about the different strategic merits of various Twilight Imperium factions or the proper balance between insurgents and militants in a Root game, and boy oh boy did that monkey's paw curl.
Ticket to Ride: First Journey says six and up, so not for a while.
But speaking of board games, we found a board game called My First Orchard which is designed for children 2 and up, so you can start them pretty young!
Our 2 year old can't quite follow the rules quite yet, but can understand "mommy and daddy roll the die, and then you pick up the fruit that the die shows," which is pretty solid for a 2 year old.
My son likes this game too but when he started playing at 2 somehow it turned into he rolls the die, then flips it to the color he wants, then takes the fruit. Also, if you roll the bird that bird is also put in the basket.
If your kid is into Root, he definitely turned out okay without a shadow of a doubt. For me, Carcassone was the family obsession we gre up with as kids; my Mom slowly purchased more and more expansions and base sets until we were playing a sprawling, amalgamated version of the game which would last the better part of a day and required us to attach leaves to our heirloom wooden table. Beautiful memories.
> he proceeded to learn how to override the auto-timer and turn it on himself at any hour of the night, at which point he felt licensed to bang on the door
I don't see as much of myself in my son, but that's for the best. I was a monster of a child and I prayed that he would take more after my wife.
He is gentle when he plays and he enjoys cleaning up. We bought him a toy car at a toy store but he kept trying to return it to the shelf where he'd originally found it.
My father concurs that these behaviors definitely come from my wife.
Never been a fan of trains, but I'm somewhat crazy about river boats - as much as my father, or probably more! Give me a spot on the bank of a navigable river, and I can spend many hours just watching them barges and cruise liners go by. I never got into factual obsession, but that's only because it was almost impossible to get ANY information about river ships when I was a child: unlike cars or even trains, there were no easy-to-get books with pictures and stats. Our neighbor, an old lady, had a calendar with some photos from a river museum (which I only got to visit some 20 years later: it's in another city, pretty hard to find, and not easy to get into, because it doesn't work on weekends or holidays, and is only open for a part of the day). Still, I learned all the types and how to recognize them from afar!
As you can guess, Mark Twain's "Life on Mississippi" was a great read for me, and I'm very fond of all songs that mention river boats. I wish I could visit USA and learn more about American river ships, but these days this is somewhat problematic, and as far as I could find, there are no more long passenger cruises on any of the big rivers :( I also wanted to go on a river cruise in China, but cruises available to foreigners cost too much, because they only let foreigners on the best (and most expensive) liners.
Viking does Mississippi River cruises (including one that goes all the way from New Orleans to St. Paul, 22 days), but they're fairly expensive. Amusing to see them anchored on the riverbank near my house occasionally, though.
Wow, that's cool! I hope things cool down geopolitically in my lifetime and I can save some money to go on such a cruise. 22 days is really a lot - the longest river cruise I've been on was just 16.
I love this - very relateable. We also had these kinds of negotions. Just wait until they're old enough that they start trying to negotiate what the letter of law should be and why, and adjudicating their edge cases...
Oh, and I was also freaked out when my eldest showed concern over existential risk at an extremely early age before he knew anything about AI. He was concerned about the sun buring out and the heath death of the universe.
“Surely there can’t be a gene for train obsession”: I dunno. Five years ago my older sister and I helped our mother move into assisted living. She had brought along flatware and dishes. Most of the things my family owned came from secondhand stores. Our dishes and flatware were unmatched, most of it from 50 years before. When we put the dishes away, I showed my sister a spoon with a fat black plastic handle. “Never throw this away,” I said. “It is my favorite spoon.”
She laughed and told me this story: Fifteen years before she had been at the family house with my younger brother. He showed her the matching fork—these were the only two utensils from that particular set—and said, “Never throw this away. It is my favorite fork.”
It’s just a cheap spoon but there is something about the way the black plastic handle fits in my hand. It is perfect, and it turns out my brother felt the same way. To our sister it was just secondhand flatware.
This is a very sweet writeup and also made me LOL several times, kudos.
A few scattered comments:
-- I have two sons. I am a fairly-strong train geek since early adulthood, in a mutual reinforcement with my eldest sibling who actually spent his 20s working as a unionized freight-rail conductor before going back to college and ending up with a successful career in software engineering. My eldest had the toddler-boy trains obsession at say the top of the normal range, which was naturally fun for me.
My youngest though was, from ages 2 to about 6, known among all relatives and neighbors as "the trainiest of trainy boys". Which was again fun for me! Too many anecdotes to choose but here's one: we live in Chicago, and of course rides on our L system were a solid choice for an afternoon's entertaining of the preschooler. Then I realized that O'Hare Airport has a completely different kind of train (monorail between terminals and parking lots), and is at one end of an L line....we cracked up plenty of travelers and airline personnel who noticed us just riding back and forth on that monorail.
-- "this is of course the first sign of a future great blogger", hah! Had to clean iced tea out of my keyboard after that one.
-- the toddler-parenting analogy to feudalism absolutely works and is very funny.
-- my wife and I definitely adopted toddler catchphrases as our own.
-- my work for years now has been with high-level field biologists and ecologists doing active restoration work and science, so the story about your wife reaching down to pick up the millipede will get retailed. Also “No, you can’t kill that beetle, it eats a bug which kills butterflies, which means it’s one of the good ones!” yep, that's my professional tribe. Though TBH veteran field ecologists swapping stories about their end of the day tick-removal counts can make anybody who isn't them shudder and leave the room.
-- "a horde of I-don’t-have-children-myself-buts will show up to tell me that"....as a young parent I just sighed and treated that as a price-of-doing-business. As a much-older dad the second time around I've been way closer to, just fuck right off please.
Online (like here) if somebody does that once or twice I'm just ignoring it; after that well that's what the mute-user function is for. Partly just from my getting older I'm sure (life's too damn short etc), and partly because in my experience the people who do that will never stop doing it even if asked. (They'll just switch to litigating their inalienable right to do it.) Nope, sorry, see "life's too damn short".
As our kids have gotten older, we've been able to explain to them the reason why we paid the enforcement price for the basic rules of the family: it meant we could take them with us to trips, events, and experiences that they'd otherwise spend with the babysitter.
The justification helped us stick with the often exhausting rule explanation and negotiations, even when they were too young to understand why we did it.
If I had a nickel for every nerdy online writer I liked whose wife had an education in entomology, I would have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
I suppose I inherited my love of trains from my dad. He wasn't the stereotypical train enthusiast--no rare mileage collecting, nor train photography, nor model trains of his own--but he did insist, through the 1980s, that our annual family vacation from the West Coast to the Midwest to see our extended family would be done via Amtrak, and he subscribed to both Passenger Train Journal and Rail Travel News and was a longtime member of NARP. He showed me how to estimate the train speed by timing mile markers. I think it was the repeated exposure to trains--not only riding them, but also the enhanced exposure to other trains that riding passenger trains gives you. As a child I was a full-on train enthusiast: one of my favorite books was The Big Book of Real Trains, and around second grade I saved up a bunch of money in order to buy a moderately fancy N-Scale model train layout. There was a point, around the time I was perhaps 3 years old, where I insisted my parents stop the car anytime a train went by, so I could watch the whole thing go by. I would still prefer to do that, but not over the objections to the rest of my family now, who are not as enthusiastic about trains as I am. My children (presently teens, both sons) are wonderful, but I was unable to inspire in either of them a similar fascination with trains. All kids are different, one learns, but I do think their lack of train enthusiasm is in part because of a paucity of train travel in their younger years.
This post gave me more visceral appreciation than anything I've read before of the fact that human brains evolved for politics. We don't have any kids, but we do have a border collie, and there is the same story with rules, and rituals, and if you indulge and allow her to break a rule once or twice, it means you yielded territory and she'll try to consolidate her gains.
Except that the toddlers are clearly playing this game on an entirely different level, like a dolphin next to a human olympic swimmer - both can be impressive on their own terms, but there is no doubt who was born for it as a way of life.
This is incredibly beautiful and gave me fresh eyes to see my toddler.
Also: I will attempt to assert a right in the reader/blogger feudal code to fail to mind my own business on one parenting issue so long as it is paired with a compliment. If you haven't already, I'd encourage you to transition your kids to toddler beds if they can climb out of the crib--I've known a few toddlers who got really hurt falling out of their cribs.
Wonderful! You and they are great negotiators and they are learning valuable life skills. I still remember potty training for our older son (now in his 40s) when he was about 3. We had been on a 4 hour car trip and he had a clean diaper at the end, so we knew he had control. So we sat him on the potty to use it and he threw a fit. Even claimed we wanted his dirty diaper back as an alternative. We then told him he could have some M&Ms if he used the potty. His response was to quit screaming and ask "How many?" Nary an accident after that.
But: where did you find this community of people saying that kids must be disciplined to hell and back? Have you considered that it's just one community out of many others?
Over here, a few young parents I know are into the polar opposite fashion, and apparently in those circles you're a TERRIBLE PARENT if you ever so much as raise your voice or force a kid to do something it doesn't want to do.
Also, somewhere in the 1970s there was a parenting fashion that kids should be left alone when it's time to sleep, no soothing them if they cry. A few decades later, the local consensus is that this was highly traumatizing, and parents should bond with them and rescue them from "cry because I can't sleep" situations.
I, too, was forced to confront how much I overuse the word "actually"—and how much I correct and lecture—when my I found my toddlers starting every third sentence with "Atchurry, ..."
May daughter is 14 months. I’m very much looking forward to chatting with her.
As far as Jewish bedtime legal codes are concerned, we grew up learning from parents and teachers that you are not allowed to speak after saying the blessing on sleep. This is a great example of what happens when your religious authorities are not celibate.
For some grievances Reddit gives about uploading ANY trace of your children to the internet, I'm kinda surprised that you freely gives us these cute photos. Unless it's another people's children all along heh.
I think the people who are fanatics about the dangers of putting photos of one's kids online are profoundly wrongheaded. Their problem is that they're busy imagining some creep masturbating to the an image of their kid. Look, most of us can be sure that in our lifetimes various creeps who have seen us or our kids in photos or in person have masturbated to sexual fantasies of us, or thought with relish about torturing us, killing us, taking us hostage, etc etc. Get over it! Part of getting over it is recognizing that in the weird corners of your mind you've had godawful fantasies yourself -- such as, for example, your fantasies of people harming your kids in unspeakable ways.
But I'm also sympathetic to the viewpoint that a person has a right to their image, and that while parents have a right to make decisions about their children, they should exercise strong restraint when doing so.
As a parent of a very picky eater, I think you may be overlooking a basic fact of life:
If you eat no fiber whatsoever, you will suffer horrible, painful, health-damaging constipation.
It doesn't necessarily have to be green veggies, but they need to get it from somewhere.
We try hard to respect our children's autonomy, and allow them to negotiate when they have constructive suggestions or arguments, but we also set pretty firm boundaries when they refuse to ingest any fiber.
Ehh, kids get less picky as they get older, and they also become much more able to get themselves to do something they don't feel like doing, such as eating a few bites of a vegetable they're grossed out by. There are some things where it's best to get in there early, and start working to influence kids to be a certain way, and there are others where it's better to wait until they become more open to influence. I think eating veggies is firmly in the latter category.
Also, seems to me your vehemence is powered by an textbook example of the all-or-nothing and catastrophizing cognitive distortions: "If you eat no fiber whatsoever, you will suffer horrible, painful, health-damaging constipation." First of all, I'm pretty sure this is factually wrong. Aren't there people who tend towards loose bowels no matter what they eat?. That tendency, if powerful enough, may be a problem in and of itself but it still pops your generalization. Also, people given oxycodone and pain killers are routinely told to take Senokot and Miralax daily, and doing that generally overcomes the very powerful constipating effect of the oxy. I'll bet it would also work for the hypothetical wretch in your mind who eats zero fiber.
And besides, there are lots of things most kids and adults love that provide fiber: nuts, nut butters, popcorn, cheerios, fruit smoothies . .
The wretch is not in my mind, nor hypothetical, alas.
It did not reach the worst documented states, but for one of my children, persistent refusal to ingest fiber and fighting against our efforts to get them to eat it had consequences that have lasted a decade and may never go away entirely.
I readily grant that I overgeneralized, and that it's possible there are people whose bowels can handle a fiberless diet just fine.
I have excellent firsthand evidence that not everyone can, however.
I think there are a number of other works of art that mention the phenomenon raised here from Hiawatha. "These are the days of our lives" by Queen comes to mind.
Your kids are just ridiculously, objectively adorable. I wanted to tell you this in case you privately suspected that your beliefs on this subject were just your genes being happy at having been propogated.
It feels like, in all seriousness, you created a new form of art with these essays that sneak in staggeringly beautiful motifs through scientific analysis. I'm grateful I was born in the same era as you, God bless you all (wish there was a secular way to say this)
It is one thing to inculcate your culture before the age of five... but I do hope you have a tone of voice, or something, to indicate "Do as Daddy Says, NOW."
Children are constantly doing things that are unsafe, for whatever reason, and parental intervention may not be as effective if it has to go through a "two more minutes?" filter.
Mommy is usually the quick-response crisis handler, and I do have a scary tone I rarely use outside of street safety and bad climbing ideas.
Though on a particularly bad day, I managed to intone "NOT TODAY, Kai." with such chillingness that he went from whining about bedtime to immediately turning around, walking downstairs, climbing into his crib himself, and staying silent until he fell asleep.
The kids are pretty adequate at figuring out how seriously to take directions from tone. Granting them "2 minutes" for most transitions is just usually not much of an imposition.
I've been a parent since 1981. You sound like you are doing a great job as a parent. In my experience, it's a lot of negotiations, a lot of tyranny (from both directions until it isn't as necessary), a lot of arbitrariness, and the absolute best fun in the world.
Probably waaay too late in the response chain, but thinking about childhood memories from previous lives... is this really just woo? Or could there be a physical thing happening that makes this possible? Thinking about from a game theoric standpoint, the ability to pass down memories sounds like a huge plus for survival. It can't be from the parents, but it could be from the grandparents etc. And memories are just a bunch of weights and connections, a developmental process that impressed a bunch of weights on the developing brain would show up as memories. Then at some point in time a flag would be set "consolidate memories!" and the disparate echoes would (hopefully) meld into a unitary mind. Crazy? We're finding that neural development is way more complex than we thought with loops and recursions and crazy shit.
Bug tubes! I grew up with the homemade equivalent. You upend a jar over the bug, slide a piece of paper underneath to cover the opening, and dump the bug outdoors. I *still* handle bugs indoors that way, and get teased to death about it. So glad to hear about another family that just does not feel ok about stomping on the things! But I'm on the east coast and I suppose Bugtubesters are more common on the left coast.
I deal with bugs, spiders, and hymenoptera using the exact same paper-and-jar-or-cup technique, and my children have picked it up from me.
We cannot exist in this universe without an unending tower of death beneath our feet, but we can at least choose not to kill where it's only a mild inconvenience to save life.
What sorts of things do they do on their tablets, and is it cultivating a healthy and intentional relationship with computing? I lament that there's no way to give them Claude. When asking Claude about this, it surfaced https://playpokpok.com , which sounds like it's essentially toys, like, active and self-directed, not overstimulating, but adapted to the touchscreen computer medium.
1. "Feudal" is a fun way to put it. But should one go mediaeval on them? Maybe "pre-modern" - but boooring.
2. No gene for trains, but trains satisfy fascination with power and order - perfect bait for an OCD-kid. See Simon *Baron-Cohen's work on the cognitive style "systemizing".
Wonderful, sweet, fun, and informative -- and I'm 78, have raised two boys, and love being with our grandson who is 11 years old and lives too far away but who we made the effort to be with a lot more when he was preschool and found every moment fascinating. I'm happy for you and your family and appreciate the sharing. Thanks.
Hey Scott, I hesitated a long time about writing this, not wanting to come across as a pushy know it all, but I’ve decided to do it.
As you have may have picked up, I’m a psychologist who treats OCD, and I'd like to cast a vote in favor of your starting to intervene when your son does OCD-ish things like close the closet door over and over. All kids have funny little quirks about things having to be done a certain way, but in your son’s case I think you should be cautious about giving quirks like this room to grow.. You think your son has a mind sort of like yours, and OCD is heritable — so given all that, I think your wonderful little guy actually is at pretty significant risk for OCD himself. But his neuroplasticity is huge right now, and my intuition is that at this stage it might be possible to just nip OCD in the bud, or at least to install something that forever nips any budding OCD that pops up in him at the stage when it's still young and fragile.
If you were to try to do that, I’d say do it with a very light hand at this point. Fold it in with other things you’re encouraging him to grow out of, stuff like using a diaper instead of the potty, or climbing on things where there’s a risk he could get hurt. So you just talk about the advantages of restraining himself from doing the thing he feels like doing. If he uses the potty instead of the diaper, he saves everyone some clean-up time, plus he’s acting more like a big kid. If he doesn’t let himself stand on the back of that armchair, he saves himself from a fall that’s going to hurt. You could compare the door-closing to the armchair-standing, identifying both as things that are going to have a bad outcome sometimes. Tell him sometimes people who like to do something over and over start craving to do it a whole lot, and then doing it uses up a bunch of their time, plus it makes the people who see them think they are silly.
If you wanted to go further, you could try to get him to identify why he does it, and how he decides to stop. He is likely to tell you he does it til he gets a good “feels right” feeling, and then you can say something like, “oh yeah, there are lots of things like that in life. I have some, but I wish I didn’t because they’re a nuisance. Everybody has some — like for instance when I say it’s bed time you and your sister both don’t think the idea of going to bed feels right.” Then for a while talk with him now and then about his day, and times when it felt right to do something, and times when circumstances forced him to do something that didn’t feel right, and how that all worked out. The point of this is to introduce the idea that he is able to restrain himself from continuing to do something it feels right to do, and the restraint doesn’t feel all that bad, and life goes on afterwards and life is good.
You could at some point progress to practicing with him doing little things that are a bit hard, but bearable, like holding a cookie right in front of his mouth but not biting into it for a while, or jumping up & down to the point that he’s sick and tired of doing it, then jumping 5 more times. Congratulate him when he succeeds. So now you’re teaching him it’s good sometimes to push yourself to do something that feels a bit bad. And then you could start working on cutting down on the number of closet door closings, and congratulate him on his successes. Given that it's repetitions that he likes, I think the goal should be One Closing. Or occasionally, as an exercise, Zero -- leave the damn thing open. Life will continue, and life will continue to be good, with an open closet door.
First of all....what godforsaken element on this page is playing sound when I hit the space bar? (Needs to be the full page, not the comments page.)
Second, I'm amazed at the idea of closing doors in your own house when you leave the room. All doors in every place I've ever lived stay open at all times except for privacy considerations, or maybe to avoid heating/cooling sometimes. Turn out the lights, maybe, if you're being very dad-like (but I don't bother with that during the day).
I once worked with a guy who was very liberal. So I assume he was ideologically allergic to any sort of genetic determinism. Nonetheless his verdict was that having kids made you believe in the power of nature over nurture.
This is interesting. My son, when he was around three years old, was fascinated with subway trains. I used to take him to the 14th Street subway station so he could watch them come and go. When we were on a local and passed by another train, he would shriek out "Express!" I also used to take the number seven train with him out to the train yard near the old Shea Stadium so I could show him where all the trains spent the night. Who would have thought that the New York City subway system would be the best place to take your kid?
You might want to swap the boy out of the crib and into a bed. If he can climb out of the crib, the crib isn't helping. But by climbing out, he could fall and injure himself.
I loooove this. Thank you for writing it, Scott.
It very funny, indeed.
Beautiful.
Also 2 of the pictures contained secret cows: The second one (painted on the wall at the children's museum) and the last one (a plushie toy)
Pretty sure the 2nd one is Bluey (unless the cow plushie is especially hidden)
I love these posts.
My upstairs time.
Thank you Scott & family.
Have fun!
My friend's son (in NY) also used to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the subway map and start listing all the stations at random times in any conversation (also, whenever he was actually on the subway). Sadly he's since grown out of it.
He should've collaborated with Jay Foreman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jPyg2pK11M
Man, I get why he did it (largely a matter of YouTube limitations...), but it's still confusing that he renamed his channel to "Map Men".
Sounds like a play on tv show "Mad Men"
I don't think it is? Like, other than the names being one letter off, there's no particular resemblance between the two series; I don't think there's anything in Map Men that's playing on Mad Men.
Also, I'm not talking here about the fact that Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper started a series called "Map Men" on Jay Foreman's YouTube channel, which dates back like 10 years; I'm talking about the fact that Jay Foreman recently renamed the *channel itself* to "Map Men" in order to better promote that one series.
Man you weren't joking about today's categories being confusing, I got blue but I have no idea about the others (hit two misleads so far)
...did you mean to post this here Shaked
Maybe he just got up to Mornington Crescent and stopped.
As a kid I memorized a lot of European countries and their capitals because I played a lot of Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?.
I have two toddlers, and this is the best description I've ever read of what it's actually like.
If you’ve never heard anyone say that liking trains is genetic then you haven’t spent very much time on /r/autismmemes
I was going to say. I feel certain Scott knows about this and must have decided not to comment on it for the sake of whatever narrative he was constructing.
I mean I once saw a poster at the eye doctor that said to get your kids tested for their vision because 1 of 2 people have blurry vision and they won’t know until you test them.
It seems plausible to me that if people can’t even tell their vision is near-sighted, other less obvious things about your experience of the world would be even easier to miss.
i would not be surprised if at least 90% of rationalists are autistic. But since everyone is, then I could see it being weird to turn it into a *thing.* But also from my experience, a lot of people in nerd communities genuinely don’t know it about themselves. Many of them think they have OCD, or have no idea why their insomnia is so bad.
It’s funny, I think a lot of what rationalists have built for helping to navigate the world (updating your priors, for example), are genuinely helpful things for autistic people, and that should be more widely known.
(I have been working at an autism clinic for the past year after getting sick of corporate work so I have some basis for my opinions, but I’m not always right either)
As a kid, I couldn't tell my vision was near-sighted because only one eye was really bad, so I compensated with the other eye well enough most of the time. It ended up well enough that I just assumed everyone's vision was like mine!
Then we visited a science museum with an exhibit on eyes that had a vision test, and I wanted to check it out (like everything else in the museum), so Dad got to see me roundly fail the test.
I was exactly like that, but my kindergarten teacher flagged it because I kept closing one eye to read the blackboard...
Hopefully he took you to buy a monocle.
Specifically about trains though? There are at least 4 choices (dinosaur, robot, train, rockets) and this one chose exactly the same as his father.
So firstly, even if we assume 4 exclusive choices of interests, we should point out the obvious error in Scott's thinking, which is that his son inherited his same interest genetically because he is the male child. Obviously there are gender related differences that tend to emerge in general in people, but Scott would have to have way more children to determine to what extent it is gender-based and to what extent it was random that the interests of his children lined up with the genders of the parents. As counter examples, my dad was the one who understood me the best (I am a woman), and with the toddlers that I have worked with, I have seen girls who are interested in trains and boys who are interested in music.
So if we expand out the sample size to 2 children, one of whom had a shared interest with the father, it suddenly seems less likely that trains as a specific interests was passed down, but rather more the trait for intense interests was passed down, and the son happened to develop the same interests as the father. In fact, in terms of combinatorics and assuming 4 distinct interests that are equally likely, there is a 3/8 chance of one child having the same interest as the father while the second has a different one. It is thus not strange statistically to see Scott and his son share an interests.
Trains tends to develop as an interest for many people because it combines spinning (wheels), cause-and-effect play, things that follow a predictable pattern, they are large and visually interesting, and there are lots of variants easily available for kids (toy tracks, thomas the tank engine, train parks). Likely the train obsession in Scott's son was not borne out of nowhere, but after being exposed to train toys.
Music actually tends to be another really common interest.
Yeah what exactly are toys that are given (between those 4 major interests) to the children is a big confounder
> and there are lots of variants easily available for kids (toy tracks, thomas the tank engine, train parks).
This is a bit circular. The reason these are available widely is because many kids develop an interest.
Only if you think trains are the only possible thing that could fit the other descriptors. Even if you can’t think of any other thing, including availability as a reason is still allowing for the possibility that something else that fits the other descriptors could theoretically exist.
As an illustration of what I mean, if you assume the average person tends to like sports for various reasons, then it would not be circular to say that Americans tend to like (American) football because it is widely available in their country, while English people tend to like soccer because it is widely available in theirs.
My boy/girl twins just turned one and I can't wait to experience this. Too early to know for sure, but seems like we each got a little version of us <3
"It’s like Mudjekeewis says - you’ve got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you."
Wait until you have a grandson. You'll be much older, uglier, tired and maybe cynical but the thrill is just as strong--and just as surprising.
And you can hand over your grand kids when you are done with them.
"Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live rememb’red not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee."
Beautiful! Sublime!
It's funny how kids comply with rules sometimes. I have twins. We taught them they had to hold our hands when they crossed the street. They interpreted the hand holding as the important part and started crossing the street holding each others hands. Thankfully, nobody ended up getting hit by a car so I get to smile while I tell the story.
Similarly, I learned in class in the third grade that drinking and driving was Bad, capital b.
But nobody ever specified drinking ALCOHOL was the bad part. Just the act of drinking while driving was Wrong and Dangerous.
I was very upset in the back seat to see mom drink a coke from the McDonald’s drive through.
Kids can be tiny, sometimes very confused, enforcers!
I had that same confusion for years, but I think as a mark of a future rationalist I was mainly consciously confused rather than assuming my Dad was horribly breaking the rules.
I thought "driving without a license" meant that you went to prison if you lost your wallet and got pulled over. I believed this much, much later than I should've lol.
Hah, I'm glad I'm not the only one. My mother still likes to tell the amusing anecdote of when I was like 5 years old and started scolding my dad for drinking the coffee he'd just picked up at the McDonald's drive-thru.
When my mom paid for something & got change back , I thought the cashier was giving her back money because she had paid the wrong amount. I felt embarrassed for my mom.
When I was six or seven I concluded that commerce favoured the buyer, thus:
The seller received only money; the buyer received both a material good and money.
This is why I chew on frozen alcohol while driving.
My nephew went one better on this and decided it was valid to hold his own hand through the parking lot. (I blame Miley Cyrus.) Thankfully, this innovation was also detected and reproved before he got hit by a car.
It is, indeed, very funny and nice, actually. Always enjoy these sorts of updates. You've got to have Something To Protect.
In the vein of daydreaming about epsilon-probability things: I think wanting to roll the dice and see what character sheets pop up for progeny is not a particularly pure-hearted motivation for me to want children, but an honest one at least. (Narcissistic, maybe? But then why inflict children on the world at all if one doesn't have a decent level of self-regard?) Absent actual cloning, it's just really difficult to come face-to-face with accurate representations of one's self. Certainly I find myself ruefully laughing at the cosmic joke of Turning Into My Parents, despite spending young adulthood vowing that'd never happen. Can't break the chain, for better and for worse.
I'm basically an anti natalist, but I also recognise that the anti natalist arguments will probably only work for those who should not have kids. If you love yourself and life and the world, and think your kids will be happy and have a positive impact on everything, you'll just think the antinatalist argument is ridiculous. I think if one is to have kids, although I fundamentally disapprove, they probably should be a little full of themselves.
Pretty much.
I hate myself and would hate to see it reproduced. It would just seem like another slap in the face to be reminded of my deficiencies again.
Caplan's book that basically says "don't you worry, genetics trumfs all, your children are going to turn a lot like you! :)" like that's supposed to be uplifting?? I do NOT want anyone to have a psyche like mine.
Exactly.
I'll literally start seeing a glass as 'one-third empty' when drinking something. I was a teenager in the 90s and was paranoid about the draft. I majored in a STEM field because if I failed and had to do education, there was a shortage of teachers in those subjects at the time. I picked a career subpath with the highest returns to *mediocrity*, because I didn't know if I'd be good or not before I started, right? I never dated until I was almost 30 out of a combination of fear of harassment accusations and divorce settlements, and before I started dating I went to the men's divorce firm to tell me what to look out for. I would stay in relationships I disliked for *years* because I was afraid the person would try to smear me if I left.
Nah, let the poisoned seed die.
All of these things sound totally normal, plus or minus a mild anxiety disorder, and some of them describe me also. I think you should get treatment for anxiety/depression, and if you don't want kids, you're fine, but this is hardly "let the curse upon my bloodline die out" levels of bad. You can probably even genetically select kids for low internalizing behavior now if you really want (I can't remember if that's actually on panels, but it will be soon).
What are you, a psychiat...oh, wait.
I'm 47. There's really no point at this point, those sperm are riddled with errors and I don't think the extra IQ points are worth it. Plus I'd have to date *substantially* younger, and only the top tier of men can do that--my net worth is seven digits, not nine.
But, y'know, thanks for the vote of confidence. And yeah, I think being able to genetically select out depression etc. is going to help a lot of people in the future!
You are making the ethical assumption that "normal" people should have children. I don't think so, I think even people with mild anxiety disorders probably shouldn't. Neuroticism is a curse.
Scott beat to me to it, but I was going to suggest embryo selection might be helpful as well.
I have mixed feelings about some of my own genetic endowments but the other side of me says at least I'm not a clinically BPD fentanyl junkie knocked up with three kids before age 25.
Anyway, great article
I'm old (see above). Agreed, great article.
Some of these things might turn out differently in your kids due to environment and randomness. And if you have a kid with your exact problems, you'd be in the best position to notice and ensure that they get addressed. I hope you manage to address them as well!
I'm old (see above). There's really no point now.
I used to feel that way myself, and I still don’t particularly like myself. The loneliness in the midst of others has always been, and still remains, very tangible to me.
When I was 21, I had a sort of girlfriend, more out of mutual desperation than anything else. We were incompatible in every conceivable way, but her own longing - among other things, she kept birds, and sooner or later they all flew out the window and died in the Norwegian climate - led her to stop taking the pill. So I became a father before I turned 22.
At first, I was devastated, but I immediately took on the full responsibility. There was no alternative. Before long - in fact, quite quickly - I realized that this little being had everything to teach me, and I her. Looking back, it is clear to me that no one has taught me more about how to be in the world than my own children. Without them, I would probably have gone under quite quickly. To put it in perspective, I have attended more funerals after suicides and overdoses than I have weddings. That is kind of sad.
Later I had more children, this time with a good person who, cliché as it sounds, complements me. She is, for example, exceptionally good with other people and possesses a remarkable social instinct that will always remain a magical mystery to me. Together we have created our own people. In a way, she probably didn’t need that, considering how effortlessly she gets along with others, but for me it has been essential to be able to spend my life with more functional versions of myself—people with whom I genuinely have something in common.
The symbiosis of learning continues, and I honestly don’t know who grows more through the relationship: me or them. My eldest daughter turns eighteen this summer. She has just returned home after a year as an exchange student abroad. Her friends here cried with joy when she came home, after she had cried with grief over having to leave the new friends she had made. These days we mostly see each other for dinner, when we’re out practising driving, or at BodyPump every Tuesday. She is becoming an independent person.
Yesterday my youngest daughter wanted to go skateboarding, so we went to the skate park. Afterwards we had ice cream and read a book together—perfectly sensible things to do on a summer’s day, if you ask me.
Cute, happy for you. But all you describe of yourself is that you're a little more socially awkward than your current partner and feel a bit lonely. Some of us are mentally or physically ill, or just highly neurotic, and I don't think we should pass that on just to get personal fullfilment through parenting.
In the nineteenth century in Norway, there existed a registry of families believed to suffer from hereditary insanity. The most distinctive branch of my family was recorded there. Many of us descendants still carry a fair number of mental challenges, even though the disease-tainted blood must by now be thoroughly diluted; nevertheless, most of us manage reasonably well and live fairly ordinary lives, tending to the garden and such.
Moreover, I read in the memoirs of an ancestor that the male line of this family was also marked by making exceptionally good choices of wives. Probably just boastful bragging
If you look at how people actually come to have kids or not, you'll be quickly disabused of the need to be pro- or anti-natalist. It's entirely unrelated.
> I think if one is to have kids, although I fundamentally disapprove, they probably should be a little full of themselves.
My kids are definitely full of themselves. Very smug little buggers.
Doting on the twins *and* taking a potshot at the Times? Two of my favorite Scott personae in one post!
No child of mine will ever write for the New York Times!
This man loves his kids. Makes parenting sound so fun.
My friend's kids are...fond of trains, and that's why I know about the camera at "The Diamond." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhNpn9L5ndM
Also, your bit about Lyra being the IT twin made me think of my own twins at that age; I always had the Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities" in my head because "you've got the brawn, I've got the brains; let's make lots of money" was absolutely how they operated.
“See Nana two minutes?”
thats so sad
They will see Nana this weekend for Fourth of July!
Does Nana believe in video calls? The request was to “see” Nana, not technically to be near her.
Video calls twice a week are the only way my mom manages to continue living across the globe from her only two grandchildren.
Seems pretty plausible there is something pretty close to a gene for train obsession. It does seem to be a pretty strong interest for many people with a certain kind of aspergerish vibe (vibe .. probably not that much to do with the medical diagnosis but you know what I mean).
Pathologising admiration for the technical artefacts of mankind is bad, actually.
Uhh why is that pathologising it? There are plenty of genes for good things -- be it trivial like eye and hair color or more significant. I'm pretty glad I have the standard human version of foxp2 not the earlier one most great apes have.
If I thought that kind of aspergerish vibe was bad I probably wouldn't be reading this substack.
When I was small, I also drew meaningless loops on the page. But eventually they resolved themselves into the wheels of trains.
This does make me wonder if the claim I heard that people lost a lot of appreciation for how much is influenced by genetics when families stopped living in the same village might be true.
More related to the reduction of the proportion of the population working in agriculture, I suspect.
I'm sure that affected how they viewed differences between animals but people always tend to believe that for some reason what they see in beasts doesn't apply to people. If you have family members living near each other you are more likely to notice correlations.
Of course you may get plenty of false positives too because of cultural factors but that depends on how much variation there is between families etc.
Do you mean contemporary people, or those from the pre-industrial era? If the latter, then I would say that they had much stronger (and more accurate) opinions on biological inheritance than the former. The literature of the time (and even from the 19th century) often throws up examples of "the importance of breeding" in defining human traits.
I meant the pre-industrial ones. And yes, I agree but the possibility I was raising is that this was because they saw enough human breeding to see that human traits were very heritable.
Had those people lived in a world in which people moved as far from home as they do in the modern world -- meaning you very rarely saw grown members of the same family to compare -- I don't think they would have just assumed that people must be like the beasts. Maybe they should have but I think people are pretty willing to assume we are unlike the other animals unless forced to confront it.
Two more bits of parenting technology that have come in handy with handling these sort of negotiating dilemmas for our kids (3.5 and 2):
- Offering special reasons when the usual rules are broken. For example, there's (sometimes) a kiddie train at our mall that our kids want to ride every time they see it. We go there frequently enough that if we let them, the price would far outpace the value of the experience to them (but they wouldn't naturally temper their asks, because they don't understand the cost side of the equation). But the one-time value exceeds the one-time cost -- if we were on vacation, it would be a no-brainer. So we needed to find a way to limit the frequency, without subjecting it to a negotiation. Enter my parents: Our rule is that they can ride the train when they are visiting, but not when they aren't. Plus, it gives them positive associations with their grandparents!
- Offering weekly or monthly rhythms. Weekly rhythms becomes natural once preschool starts, which in Singapore is at 18 months, and they start to cherish weekends, like they'll do for the rest of their lives. For monthly rhythms, after she turned 3, we started offering our daughter monthly 1-on-1 ice cream dates. This doubles as an incentive for her to learn the calendar, as every time the month changes, she knows she can ask to go have ice cream again!
Just give them an allowance and let them decide? They'll learn to understand the tradeoff soon enough.
Those ages are a bit young for an allowance, they are more likely to eat the money than hold onto it, and they won't really understand what it means for the money to be gone and will still want to ride the train. Plus, if they get attached to the money and you try to take it to pay for the train (even if they just asked to ride it), you will have a whole new screaming experience. A virtual allowance, where you keep the money for them, is beyond their understanding and you will appear to be capricious rather than consistent which entails further screaming. We started giving our son an allowance at 5 and it's still not uncommon to find the bills crumpled up and forgotten in an odd location.
What does he say when you tell him he's free to spend his own money when he wants something?
Right now all he wants to do is save it, I think he values having it and receiving it more than using it. It's a fairly small amount of money each week, and I think he is imagining buying something really cool eventually but has a hard time with choice paralysis. The allowance is a bonus rather than a replacement of us buying him things, so he isn't deprived or anything like that. My wife loves it because if she wants to shut something down she can just tell him to use his own money.
Seems like it's working then!
But also, wow, very relatable. I was just like that too, and I regret it. Arguably I'm still like that, but the future is uncertain. You should let him know that the marginal utility of money will vastly decrease in the future and the optimal strategy is consumption smoothing. I wish someone had told me when I was young. I thought I was so wise...
You were very wise, for a kid. Wiser than many adults!
Yeah, they’re too young for a fully fungible allowance, but I could imagine kind of coupon system — “This special paper entitles you to one train ride” also working as a bridge to an allowance. Later stages could involve coupons that are good for multiple things, so they have to decide which they want.
What's wrong with fungibility? You could of course still disallow some purchases
A banlist is hard to maintain. Unless you somehow could exhaustively list all disallowed purchases (highly unlikely, and difficult to communicate anyways), it has to be constantly negotiated over, and the whole point of this was to limit the need for negotiations. An explicit allowlist is much easier.
Give them the keys to the car while you're at it
Lovely. Thanks for sharing Scott.
Also, did you notice that in the last picture they both have their legs in very similar positions?
>>I might never have noticed this if I’d only had girls. I love my daughter, but I’ve never been a little girl; it doesn’t bring anything back for me.
Not necessarily true! One of my two daughters, gender aside, is an exact copy of me down to the type of little-Idiosyncratic-quirks-that-seem-impossible-to-be-genetic mentioned in the article.
Yes! I have two daughters, and there are some ways in which they're both like my wife and not me, and plenty of ways they're like each other and not either of us, but if there's a trait shared by me and one daughter and not my wife and the other, odds are rather strong it'll be me and my eldest vs my wife and my youngest.
I have seen families where the similarity pairs are father-daughter and mother-son.
Curious about a small syntactic mention that you and your wife share different rooms?
I just moved in with my partner of a few years on the condition that we maintain separate bedrooms. I was wondering if this is a reasonable thing to maintain up until or after marriage. It just never felt correct to me that an adult couple with sufficient means should automatically always have to share a bedroom, I bargain that it could even save many a relationship.
Yeah, we have different rooms and have continued to do so after marriage. We're both introverts and light sleepers, and both keep (often desynchronized) weird schedules.
It's a "trend"!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-to-a-happy-marriage-two-master-bedrooms-1489672201
Great post. Qq, I remember you said in another post that you are really adverse to lying. You don't consider it lying telling your kids that 2 minutes have passed when they haven't?
More generally, how acceptable do you think it is to lie to children?
For context, sometimes when I offer him five minutes he'll say "No, two minutes!" because he thinks two might be larger than five. I don't think he has a well-calibrated sense of what this entails such that I am betraying him by not living up to it.
I get that but truth is a function of what you know and believe, no? Not a function of the other person's expectations?
I, for one, would have felt betrayed by something like this, at least once I got to the point of understanding it. Don't you think he'll someday read this?
With my kids I find that "two minutes" works out as longer more often than shorter so I'm sure they're winning in average.
It's not about the time, it's about the principle.
I don't know how old your kids are now, but when my stepson was age four plus a few months, childhood amnesia kicked in. It was quite remarkable. One week, he was fondly remembering all the fun things he did with his daycare teacher (whom he loved), but within a space of about two weeks, he had completely forgotten her and the rest of his pre-four-year-old life. I had made a point of talking about her frequently to try to keep those memories intact for him. We had photos of her, and he no longer remembered who she was after this inflection point.
You might want to keep an eye out for this occurrence in your kids. It would be interesting if their brains do their synaptic pruning* of their younger memories at the same time.
*According to a sketchy neurological theory
Also, the same daycare teacher I mentioned above said she'd ask her kids who they were in their previous lives (she'd phrase the question something like, "Who did you use to be before you came here?"). She said about half of them would give her some very detailed stories about who they used to be before they "came here." My ex was kinda shocked she was doing this. But I was woo-woo enough to appreciate it. My stepson didn't display any memories of being anyone else, though.
He's a young soul
It would have been interesting to record these utterances.
The Department of Perceptual Studies at UVa has been studying kids who make statements about their previous lives for a long time (50 years +), and they have aggregated a massive cache of several thousand cases, plus the relevant methodology. This isn't something you can reproduce in a clean room within tightly controlled conditions, and to reduce accidental contamination of the utterances by leading questions etc. is quite important, even though the hard-core skeptics will simply laugh anything off.
That said, I still suspect that this phenomenon is much more widespread than just "thousands", and your daycare teacher's record goes in that direction. Most of the West (with some interesting exceptions such as Iceland or Scottish Highlands) considers reincarnation "woo-woo" and people really have to trust you before they tell you that their kid speaks of a previous life. No one wants to have their kid labeled as a freak, mentally ill or just crazy, and other people are really cruel in this regard. (If anything, the cruelty became even worse with social networks.)
A case study: one of my friends, a fairly materialistic doctor, has two daughters. The older one made several spontaneous statements matching the life of her long deceased grandmother. Not just that, her personality is basically a carbon copy thereof, very untypical for that family, and she has acted "adult" when she was very young. Too adult, I would say; she was basically unmanageable by standard parental means as young as three or four, having her own judgment and following it regardless of threats or punishments.
The catch: not even her father, ex-husband of said friend, knows about those statements. He was never much into parenting, and she didn't tell him, precisely to save the kid from mocking. I might be the only person beside her to know, because she trusted me a knew that I am interested in such phenomena.
I've had enough weird stuff happen to me that I'm no longer persuaded that physicalism can accurately describe the entirety of reality. I'm perfectly willing to accept the phenomenon known as reincarnation. One doesn't have to posit the existence of souls to come up with scenarios that could lead to us having other memories.
Sure, we don't know much about the underlying mechanisms.
That said, almost all such kids talk about their memories in first person ("I was, I did, I had, I lived, I died"). I only remember a few exceptions from the published cases, and even those were IIRC mixed (e.g. using the old name in third person, then switching to first person). That consistency at least hints at something.
The look so much like you!!
>Surely there can’t be a gene for train obsession.
...
Who's gonna tell him?
There are studies on identical twins who were separated as newborns, and they indicate that they have the same jobs, hobbies, food preferences and even their partners tend to look and behave very similarly. Why not trains then.
>The twins have usufruct rights to one cup of Gatorade every morning.
I am confused. WP says that usufruct does not include the right to destroy the thing, but presumably they drink it.
>Also, Tocqueville argues that the replacement of the ancient system of fair feudal privileges and duties with one of authoritarian enforced obedience led to the French Revolution, and I’m not sure what the parenting equivalent would be but it sounds bad.
I mean, the obvious fictional example of this not turning out so great for the parents is the Gasai family from Mirai Nikki. I didn't go quite that far when Mum stopped feeding me, but I did physically fight her and lock her out of the apartment (and then run away after she had the police yell at me for a couple of hours).
It is bad. Relationships never fully recover from something like that.
Perhaps the usufruct rights apply to the cup, and not the liquid?
Water rights (maybe even mining rights) can be usufruct, so the resource only needs to be abundant like Gatorade in a supermarket.
Such a wonderful post. I also have twins (and another child) and it's very special to see two children to be so different while so close in age (one of my twins is a copy of my sister).
You’ve ridden the steam train in Tilden Park?
My wife has taken them there and they love it.
Awesome--you should give it a ride too. When my son was little he was not the only one of us clapping hands afterward and chanting "again! again!"
"(I use the term “parenting community” loosely; many of these people have no children of their own, just strong opinions on how other people should raise theirs)."
In my experience, the opinions of non-parents on how to raise children were about as useful as advice from virgins would be on how to have better sex.
That sounds like something Dave Barry might write.
Nice article and your kids sound adorable.
Gotta admit, more than a few things sound familiar coming from a family with mild heritable autism. I have a hypothesis that some things are easier for kids and parents when both are *just* enough on the spectrum to understand what the other is doing and why.
Side note: that crib looks kinda similar to the one I and my brother had as a child except ours had a bar missing leaving a gap *just* large enough for me to slide out if I needed to.
Apparently my parents first tried turning the missing bar to the wall but that led to my brother climbing out a bit like your own little one.
They decided that leaving a route to escape was safer vs him climbing over the top and turned it back.
I have very early memories of the rules about when I had to stay in the cot till. Though they were suspended at least once when I was scared of a storm.
So just to say that if you worry about him falling while climbing out like that then removing a bar or 2 probably won't cause chaos.
Speaking as someone who is not even a little bit autistic in a family not even a little bit autistic who has three not even a little bit autistic kids—this is all very familiar!
Having a toddler myself this is so relatable, especially the do a nice thing once and be cursed with it forever. Great article!
What a lovely piece. "Paying the Danegeld", hahahahaha I hate people.
The part where you have to act as a tyrannical dictator has always been one of the main things I find off-putting about the idea of being a parent. Nice to know less autocratic, more ...uh feudal arrangements are possible.
There are many parenting styles and "tyrannical dictator" is but one. I would say the vibe in our family is something more akin to "hope and peace and love and trust".
It's usually hard to be true absolute tyrant. Unless you're a true superman, you still need to negotiate sometimes. "Rules for Rulers" is a good CGP Gray video about it, but I'm very sure that he has changed the title to something incomprehensible by now.
It's called "You would be a terrible leader" now, though searching for the old title still finds it.
Too heartwarming dammit! Fwiw I'm an even more permissive parent, to a fault, certainly, and not the only one, with three adult data points and they're all totally awesome. As far as I can tell no trace of those faults made it through, almost like they raise themselves..
"(also, he has no concept of time, and if I say “two minutes over” after thirty seconds then he’s none the wiser. I try to not to exploit this loophole for personal advantage, but it’s a good lever to have in a crisis.)"
There never was a crisis so dire I would have had my parents lie to me like that, but I suppose it's theoretically possible.
Why not have a norm that disputes are to be negotiated with calm discussion rather than screaming?
Also why not just give them money and have them decide if the treat is worth the price?
Because the children are two, speak a maximum of 5-6 word sentences, and don't understand the concept of money.
Hmm, but yet they understand negotiation. I can't imagine it'll be much longer
Being a parent of young kids really helps drive home how many layers human culture is built on that adults just take for granted. Here's an example that might help illustrate: Counting.
My kids each learned the "counting chant" fairly quickly: "One, Two, Three, ..." They would sometimes skip numbers, and couldn't always pick it back up if you said something like "What's after seven?" But they mostly got that part down some time between 18 months and 2 years old.
You'd think that would mean they can count. Well, it turns out that learning the numbers is only the easy part of actually counting. The hard part is making sure you say exactly one number for each object. For this, it helps to point at each object and enunciate clearly, pausing for a little between numbers and objects, but you have to make sure you don't mess up and speed up the pace of your counting faster than the pace of your pointing, or vice-versa. This requires much more intense focus throughout, as any slip-ups can very result in a miscount.
And that's still only if the objects are neatly ordered, like cars in a row in a parking lot. Counting objects like the number of blueberries on your plate requires you to carefully keep track of which blueberries you've already touched and which you haven't. Maybe you can move them from one side of the plate to the other, but that also involves enough dexterity to be able to do that. And sometimes you can't, and you just have to visualize in your head what order you're going in, which isn't easy at all.
And that's just counting, something we all probably think of as super elementary!
What happens when you try to trade with them? Like say, I'll give you two of my yellow candies in exchange for one of your blue candies or something like that
Maybe you're a parent and this has worked for you, but for a lot of people find that the "why not treat children like they're rational actors like you'd treat an adult" strategy often runs into the problem of "children aren't adults and are rarely rational", and often just have neither the temperament (and perhaps not the cognitive ability) to respond to that strategy.
There's a section in Emily Oster's "Cribsheet" that I think of:
> When I misbehaved as a small child, my mother’s solution was to ask me to “sit on the stairs and think about it.” I would toddle off to the stairs, sit for a while and contemplate my wrongs, and then return to explain what I did wrong and that I would not do it again. My mother congratulated herself on being an amazing parent who was deeply in touch with her child and didn’t need to resort to the kind of “Go to your room!” discipline that others practiced.
> Then my brother, Stephen, arrived. He did not want to sit on the stairs and think about it when he misbehaved. In fact, he loudly refused. Things escalated to his being sent to his room. Also refused. My mother found herself physically carrying him to his room, shutting the door, and holding the door closed with all her strength while he screamed and tried to get out.
> Which goes to show, again, that parenting is much more about the child than about the parent.
And yes, some people only have (or were) the first sort of child, and assume that the second child's behavior is some failure of the parent, (which is part of how parenting debates get so toxic - people assuming approaches that worked for them will generalize)
I guess this is confounded by irrational-not-adult children that also has irrational-not-adult parents.
Thanks for writing this. These types of posts are always some of my favorites. I desperately hope I'll get to experience it someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, but I'm not optimistic.
How does this stuff work genetically? It can't be that the son inherits much more of his dad's genes (and vice versa for the daughter), right? Is it that the same genes are expressed differently depending on the sex?
Some strong traits are just very sex-chromosome dependent. I have two sons, the first one takes after me, the younger after my husband. But the first one is not quite like me: e.g., he's not as shy and cautious as I am, because this is a strongly female-coded trait and he just isn't female. Also, he has my body type and facial features, and looked very much like me at 5 when he was 5, but now at 15 y old, of course, he doesn't, for obvious reasons.
A sample size of two doesn't tell you much. For the remainder, some things are downstream of testosterone or estrogen.
Very cute.
Well, now I know what I'm missing. Still sounds like too much work on top of my job.
God bless you, sir.
The part about Hiawatha made me remember Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, one of my favourite bits of Swedish literature. Has anyone read the English translation and knows if it’s any good?
We have it in English and it's a household favorite! I don't read any Swedish, though, so I can't compare.
I remember my sister and I liked it too as kids!
Ronia robbers daughter!!! Read it in English as a kid and thought it was great. What about it reminds you of Hiawatha though? Maybe I don't remember it well enough
It’s no deep comparison or anything because I’m not too familiar with Hiawatha. But Scott gaining new appreciation for it as a parent made me think about how I’m sure the father/child relationship in Ronja is received differently and with renewed depth as a parent vs as a child.
This is so very cute. I have a daughter and already it seems like she inherited my family's musical nature.
Also, I know you just said you get way too much parenting advice, but the advice I've heard is that if a baby is climbing out of their crib, it's time to switch them to a mattress or toddler bed before they hurt themselves climbing out.
My son doesn't want to switch because he likes climbing too much.
Floor mattress for sleeping plus Pikler triangle for climbing, perhaps?
I assume children must be highly variable in how likely they are to hurt themselves while climbing. I climbed a lot and very carefully when I was younger, and adults who didn't know me getting concerned was a continual annoyance.
Yes this is very silly advice for parents of little monkeys who climb in and out of their crib with complete ease. If they're happy in it and have demonstrated proof of their climbing abilities, leave it be, I say.
It's very hard to reassure parents of the other type of kid that yes, I know my kid is up there and no, I am not rushing to bring him down. If my climber kid jumped off a swing set, oh it's just another Tuesday. Friend less than a year younger copied the exact same jump and fractured an ankle. This is a regular type of occurrence with the two of them. Some kids get frequent flyer miles at the urgent care, others just land on their feet like cats.
My son's favorite, third favorite, and fourth favorite toys are all trains and his favorite videos (with the possible exception of Wheels on the Bus) are railfan train clip compilations. Sometimes I will boot up California Trains 1 Hour for him and he will object because he wanted Amtrak Cascades New Livery (I think that one is his favorite because it looks the most like his beloved stuffed Amtrak). Sometimes he sings the Brown Bear, Brown Bear song but replaces several of the creatures with "choo-choo". Our local feudal law entitles him to at least one of train pants and a train shirt, but the second piece of clothing can be non-train-depicting if all the train pants are in the wash.
Why yes, my husband *is* a huge train nerd, funny you should ask. (It might not be entirely genetic. The stuffed Amtrak was a Christmas present before the obsession kicked in and the relevant uncle is justly smug.)
Are you aware of the website and YouTube channel Virtual Railfan?
I don't have kids but you're doing great.
I wasn't a trains kid, but I did a lot of similar things — like trying to write a 2000 page magnum opus about the history of the world, all of science (literally all of it), the city where I was born, the town where I then lived, and the city we were moving to.
I also fondly remember deducing the addition tables before I was old enough to read.
My dad had just finished working as a doctor, and so he would routinely diagram and explain organs for me as a bedtime story; unsurprisingly, I wanted a science textbook (one for eighth-graders) for my fifth birthday. I never did become a scientist, though.
Thanks, this was a lot of fun to read.
Hey Scott. Long time reader, first time poster! One question I had was whether you still plan to home school your children? I think you mentioned this before your children were born. I have to say it was the only post you've ever made that filled me with horror - mostly because I tried it out of necessity during Covid and found it very tough! I was wondering whether your opinion had changed since, and if so, what changed it or reinforced it?
Delightful blog post by the way :)
Our friends run a microschool and we will probably send our kids there.
Would you mind sharing links about their philosophy of microschooling? (Or, e.g., links that they found helpful.) I'm trying to gather resources!
See https://www.oaklandlearn.org/ and https://www.educationprogress.org/p/how-i-found-myself-running-a-microschool
To whichever ACX reader filled out our interest form in response to this mention: happy to tell you more, but the email you gave us bounced!
This is so sweet and heartwarming: thank you for sharing this!
OMG, your story of being in the paper punched me in the face. Our son was written up in a half page article of La Repubblica for his knowledge of the local transit system. He was completely obsessed with it and would carry maps. When we'd go to the city center, he'd see people who looked like they were confused and would approach them. We'd always have to assure people that this 9 YO really did understand which bus to take.
I thought that he was interested in the buses/trains themselves and we tried taking him to the meetings of the local transit aficionado club (e.g., they fix up and obsess over old trams and such). He patiently sat thru a meeting or two with the middle aged men, but then admitted that it was the system with which he was obsessed.
You've nailed it with seeing echoes of yourself, or maybe someone else in the family. He is a mosaic of our loved ones, and yet shockingly unique in unpredictable ways..
> I thought that he was interested in the buses/trains themselves and we tried taking him to the meetings of the local transit aficionado club (e.g., they fix up and obsess over old trams and such). He patiently sat thru a meeting or two with the middle aged men, but then admitted that it was the system with which he was obsessed.
Oh, this is really interesting to me, because I always felt kind of the same way -- I never had anywhere near the intensity of Trains Interest that some people are describing here, but also, the Train Fandom failed to engage me in part for precisely this reason. I didn't care about the trains themselves, it was the system I was interested in.
Yeah I'm never interested in big machines. But the logistical burden of creating those machines is an interesting topic!
Yeah, he comes at the world orthogonally to my approach. For instance, he used to play a lot of online Pokemon. He'd get into adult tournaments and would do very well (he got banned when one guy he beat in a tourney dimed him out for being underage). I thought it was him being competitive. Turns out, he enjoyed winning, but he would spend more time building and playing with "meme decks" where there was some constraint or theme that he was forced to conform to. For him, turning a system inside out and understanding how and how far it can be pushed is deeply satisfying to him.
Frankly, we are just happy that he is so passionate in a world where it is all to easy to be a couch potato consumer.
This is great, except for the part where you're still on Twitter, for some reason. That's something I've yet to understand about the world - everybody agrees that """social""" media are unambiguously awful, and yet they can't seem to avoid being there, something I've never had a slightest temptation for. But then again, I also don't like alcohol and gambling.
I don't think there's any equally good place to get AI news, and I feel like it's important to participate in discourses that might otherwise end up with everyone believing various lies and using them as excuses to coordinate against good causes.
Yeah... It's the duty of good people to throw themselves into the meat grinder to slightly influence its outputs for the better. I can admire the spirit, even while doubting the wisdom.
Lovely!
My 4 year old also has many signs of having OCD. At first we were very accommodating to his irrational behavior, but then after doing research, I found studies like this one that showed that family accommodation for children was correlated with worse outcomes and higher symptom severity as an adult. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19309195/. I could see this being reverse causation, but in the abundance of caution, I have been a lot less accommodating to my son, which causes him and my acute stress.
As a psychiatrist, you’re much more qualified to analyze the studies than I am. What is your take on the literature on how to best treat pediatric OCD? Is this perhaps worth a Much More than you Wanted to Know article, for the sake of both of our children?
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/pandas
Make sure you're actually talking about OCD.
I don't do child psychiatry and haven't looked at those studies. My intuition right now is to not lean into it, but also not make a huge deal about trying to fight it. I joke about OCD but I think that young children are also pretty weird and I don't want to leap into medicalizing it.
Yes, again at the risk of the dreaded 'parenting advice', most young children are very weird and wacky and most grow out of it.
Yes, our oldest child at age 2-3 insisted on a certain bedtime routine that included counting to three while tossing his blanket over top of him, singing a certain song, etc. That went away by age 4 and he hasn't had any comparative particulars pop up. At 8 he still likes routines, but to a normal degree.
I even remember as an older child, I played mental games that involved always stepping with my right foot first when getting up or crossing thresholds or rounding corners. It went away by my teenage years.
Likewise I had what I would now consider weird and wacky habits and priorities as a teenager and 20-something. People are people at all stages of life, and some of those stages are weird by the standards of other stages. I don't think any good would have come from pathologizing it in my life.
Great stuff, man does not live on AI safety posts alone.
Regarding toddlers and their inability to tell time--I used to compensate for this by using a timer. But then the kids demanded a timer for every little thing, and I felt like I was conditioning them to obey a machine instead of trusting their dad that time's up. Now I use event-based timing (one more book, one more slide, etc) and it works pretty well.
My kids are also obsessed with timers, so much so that if I bring in a timer because they're fighting over a toy, they sometimes start fighting over the timer instead.
Our kids also are more inclined to listen if a timer goes off than if we just say "time for bed", or "time to stop playing on the playground and go home" or "time to stop watching TV (at the grandparents')". I'm okay with it -- the point we're usually getting across with using a timer is that the timing is a deliberate decision, not just a suggestion to be discussed, even if technically, I just set a 5-second timer on my phone when I realized we need to go. It's the mechanical equivalent of switching to a stern and serious tone.
You started my day with a smile and frequent chuckles throughout.
Current favourite example of my two-year-old reasoning in real time, on seeing a woman going for a run in very short shorts:
“She forgot her trousers.”
[thinking…]
“She has to run home to get them!”
Sometimes cars in our area are seemingly racing to the muffler shop to get their mufflers fixed.
I know you try to avoid writing too much about your kids, but I love these posts, and the pictures are adorable.
Also, you should have gone to school at Georgia Tech. They sell train engineer hats in the bookstore. You could have worn one on campus as a student and no one would have batted an eye.
I just want to quote Buzz Lightyear and say, "You're a great dad!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVQVwNb2pOo
The one that got me was babies/kids in horror movies suffering in some way. I always used to think of it as the most boring component, always thrown in there and totally meaningless because it was so overdone. Then I had kids, and suddenly the screams of agony of a small child would bring up a deep sense of dread from the core of my being. Sure, it's still overdone, but I can see why they reached for it now: you can't avoid that feeling once you are a parent because your kids seem like they are actively trying to kill themselves with their blatant disregard for personal safety, and so that internal sense of dread sits there, waiting, permanently attached to your subconscious.
On a completely different note, I'd recommend some form of sound machine for you and your children. It can really help mask small household noises that would otherwise wake them up and trigger the screaming, and for yourself it can also mask a bit of the thumping in the night that children seem to constantly emit. I'm convinced a lot of cases of "ghosts" in the house are just people with kids, we've had cases where it sounded like one of the kids fell out of bed, a big thudding crash, then we'd check on them and everyone is totally fine, snug in their bed and fully asleep. The downside is you have to start carting a handful of sound machines with you on every overnight trip, but I consider it a small price to pay for that extra bit of sleep.
We all have sound machines. They're helpful, but a lot of noises happen at different frequency than the sound machines and are audible over them.
Why is there such negativity about old age in Western culture? I think many poems such as the first one here, teaches kids that. Stories they hear as kids shapes their views. I was talking to an Indian Muslim friend about stories she heard growing up. It was about Islam being the only good way. Hindus don't believe they have a monopoly on the truth, so the stories our kids hear reflect that. There's no concept of supremacy.
Hmm, obsessed with trains as a kid... that tracks.
All jokes aside, this was a very beautiful and heartfelt piece, and as a parent and Orthodox Jew (who went through a religious crisis during the Slate Stare Codex days), the last line was especially meaningful.
You've got a pretty good description here of the Kingdom of Heaven!
You start by pointing out that as we get older, we tend to be unhappier. Children have a way of looking at the world that is full of joy and wonder. This perspective seems to enable them to be happier. Then we get older, and by accumulating experiences, our anticipation becomes constrained. The end result is that we stop feeling joy, and the world stops feeling magically coherent, bound by principles that meet our true needs.
Your kids, meanwhile, continue to see life itself as if it ought to make sense.
Not in the sterile mathematical sense of "there's a single causal model that can i understand and learn through evidence" but in the more human sense, of "there are rules governing the world; the rules make sense and are just." The question "See nana, two minutes?" comes from that expectation of cosmic justice bumping into the adult understanding that no, sometimes we live very far from people we love the most.
As adults it's easy for us to imagine that we're more right than our children. We probably all assume by default that a child's expectation that his grandmother's presence would follow the same logic as bedtime is an error. That we know better. The child doesn't understand that nana lives far away, because the child is ignorant of reality.
But what if we're wrong?
What if our certainty in our ability to understand the world is a form of delusion, one that harms not by giving incorrect anticipations, but by reducing our ability to trust, and thus enjoy, life itself? What if 'see nana two minutes' is a reasonable expectation in a world where family structures took priority over economic ones, and your children's intuitive expectations line up with the cultural forms necessary to actually propagate themselves through time? What if our children's 'naive' trust is fundamentally more wise than our attempts to measure and control everything? What if our attempt to use mathematical models are not different from a child turning his head to see train tracks everywhere, because he likes that combination of power and precision?
This is one of the best things you've written lately, maybe because it sounds far more like a child expressing wonder and joy than an adult expressing certainty and pessimism. It very funny.
As someone with a similarly aged child, this was a delightful read.
Adorable!
Also, I have definitely heard the sentiment from Song of Hiawatha expressed many times before. The one I remember most is from sportswriter Bill Simmons; of David Letterman's retirement to spend more time with his son, Simmons wrote "You begin your life and it’s exciting, and then it starts to get boring, and then your kids show up and you get to relive everything through them."
At the time I thought this statement was somewhat pathetic; a decade later when I had my first child, I saw a lot of truth in it.
We're big on Game Theory in our house. Every decision is evaluated not on "what's better right now?" but on "what incentives will this produce?". Because we generally maintain bright-line rules, life is generally okay.
But if the parents go on a trip and Abuela comes to take care of him... we get to a glimpse into that other, alternate, lawless universe. IN a surprisingly short amount of time, he learns all of the emotional-manipulation tactics, including tantrums. For a few days after she's left, I have to apply the rules especially rigorously (and/or with threat of punishment should he fail to comply), so that he remembers that the Sheriff is truly back. Once that's established, we can revert to our normal mode.
"But I know that if I did it once, every future time I refused would get treated as a violation and penalized with screaming."
My wife's parents watched the kids ONE TIME while we went out to dinner. The 2-year old told them "I don't want it" regarding the peas in his mac and cheese. They let him pick out the peas, put them on a paper napkin, and then throw them in the garbage.
It took an entire month to get him to accept green vegetables again.
They also agreed when he said "read again" after his bedtime story. At least that one only took a few days for him to get over.
I'm still not convinced forcing kids to eat their vegetables is utility maximizing. I really hated it. It is not an exaggeration to say it permanently damaged our relationship. It was such a terrible feeling, the disrespect of basic autonomy. It's crazy when you think about it, that's it's so normalized to do things to kids, who mind you are plenty old enough to think of themselves as people too, that would be downright abusive to do to an adult. The case for vegetables, against a counterfactual of supplements, fruits, and vegetables in more palatable forms, isn't even that strong, considering how uncertain nutrition science is. I suppose it makes more sense for parents who value their own convenience over the basic human dignity of their children. Many such cases!
As a parent of a very picky eater, I think you may be overlooking a basic fact of life:
If you eat no fiber whatsoever, you will suffer horrible, painful, health-damaging constipation.
It doesn't necessarily have to be green veggies, but they need to get it from somewhere.
Some of ours refused veggies, fruit, and even supplements. Extremely hard to feed.
We try hard to respect our children's autonomy, and allow them to negotiate when they have constructive suggestions or arguments, but we also set pretty firm boundaries when they refuse to ingest any fiber.
You can get fiber from plenty of other sources besides one particular vegetable dish.
...did you read what I wrote?
I was saying that I've personally had children who fought hard against ingesting any source of fiber.
Not that you need to force kids to eat a particular dish.
In that scenario, to keep the child healthy, the parent needs to find a way to get the kid to eat fiber.
Different approaches do a better or worse job of respecting the child's autonomy, but in the end it's still true that a responsible parent won't allow the child the radical freedom to suffer the dire consequences of severe, unchecked constipation.
Also, what a beautiful essay. I love thoughtful observations about things kids say.
I mean this extremely warmly and kindly - I think this is perhaps the most universally human thing Scott has ever written. All parents know these dances, and it's one of the biggest unifiers on the planet.
:)
I'm going through IVF treatment and every time I read something about parenting, it fills me with joy. I can't wait. Also, my wife and I will *absolutely* talk in toddler phrases. 😂
More broadly, thank you for writing honestly and beautifully about the experience of being a parent. There should be more of this in the discourse.
Good luck with IVF!
Thank you! It's a lot but worth doing, and of course much harder on my wife (who is amazing for dealing with so many hormone injections).
Loved it, thank god for those kids
Are your kids old enough yet for Ticket to Ride: First Journey? If not, surely they will be soon, and this seems like the most obvious birthday gift ever given the whole trains thing.
Also, all discussions like this about apples not far from trees make me think of board games, because my wife and I met in 1996 playing Die Siedler von Catan with a crappy bootleg English rules translation because the real one hadn't come out yet... and when we had a son we joked that we were making a third for board games... and now we have the sort of son who will discourse at astonishing and confounding length about the different strategic merits of various Twilight Imperium factions or the proper balance between insurgents and militants in a Root game, and boy oh boy did that monkey's paw curl.
Just be glad he's not until Warhammer.
into*
Ticket to Ride: First Journey says six and up, so not for a while.
But speaking of board games, we found a board game called My First Orchard which is designed for children 2 and up, so you can start them pretty young!
Our 2 year old can't quite follow the rules quite yet, but can understand "mommy and daddy roll the die, and then you pick up the fruit that the die shows," which is pretty solid for a 2 year old.
My son likes this game too but when he started playing at 2 somehow it turned into he rolls the die, then flips it to the color he wants, then takes the fruit. Also, if you roll the bird that bird is also put in the basket.
If your kid is into Root, he definitely turned out okay without a shadow of a doubt. For me, Carcassone was the family obsession we gre up with as kids; my Mom slowly purchased more and more expansions and base sets until we were playing a sprawling, amalgamated version of the game which would last the better part of a day and required us to attach leaves to our heirloom wooden table. Beautiful memories.
Beautiful expression of parenting, thank you for this.
> he proceeded to learn how to override the auto-timer and turn it on himself at any hour of the night, at which point he felt licensed to bang on the door
Reward hacking!
Joy filled given and joy filled received.
Thank you much!!
I don't see as much of myself in my son, but that's for the best. I was a monster of a child and I prayed that he would take more after my wife.
He is gentle when he plays and he enjoys cleaning up. We bought him a toy car at a toy store but he kept trying to return it to the shelf where he'd originally found it.
My father concurs that these behaviors definitely come from my wife.
Never been a fan of trains, but I'm somewhat crazy about river boats - as much as my father, or probably more! Give me a spot on the bank of a navigable river, and I can spend many hours just watching them barges and cruise liners go by. I never got into factual obsession, but that's only because it was almost impossible to get ANY information about river ships when I was a child: unlike cars or even trains, there were no easy-to-get books with pictures and stats. Our neighbor, an old lady, had a calendar with some photos from a river museum (which I only got to visit some 20 years later: it's in another city, pretty hard to find, and not easy to get into, because it doesn't work on weekends or holidays, and is only open for a part of the day). Still, I learned all the types and how to recognize them from afar!
As you can guess, Mark Twain's "Life on Mississippi" was a great read for me, and I'm very fond of all songs that mention river boats. I wish I could visit USA and learn more about American river ships, but these days this is somewhat problematic, and as far as I could find, there are no more long passenger cruises on any of the big rivers :( I also wanted to go on a river cruise in China, but cruises available to foreigners cost too much, because they only let foreigners on the best (and most expensive) liners.
Viking does Mississippi River cruises (including one that goes all the way from New Orleans to St. Paul, 22 days), but they're fairly expensive. Amusing to see them anchored on the riverbank near my house occasionally, though.
Wow, that's cool! I hope things cool down geopolitically in my lifetime and I can save some money to go on such a cruise. 22 days is really a lot - the longest river cruise I've been on was just 16.
I love this - very relateable. We also had these kinds of negotions. Just wait until they're old enough that they start trying to negotiate what the letter of law should be and why, and adjudicating their edge cases...
Oh, and I was also freaked out when my eldest showed concern over existential risk at an extremely early age before he knew anything about AI. He was concerned about the sun buring out and the heath death of the universe.
“Surely there can’t be a gene for train obsession”: I dunno. Five years ago my older sister and I helped our mother move into assisted living. She had brought along flatware and dishes. Most of the things my family owned came from secondhand stores. Our dishes and flatware were unmatched, most of it from 50 years before. When we put the dishes away, I showed my sister a spoon with a fat black plastic handle. “Never throw this away,” I said. “It is my favorite spoon.”
She laughed and told me this story: Fifteen years before she had been at the family house with my younger brother. He showed her the matching fork—these were the only two utensils from that particular set—and said, “Never throw this away. It is my favorite fork.”
It’s just a cheap spoon but there is something about the way the black plastic handle fits in my hand. It is perfect, and it turns out my brother felt the same way. To our sister it was just secondhand flatware.
This is a very sweet writeup and also made me LOL several times, kudos.
A few scattered comments:
-- I have two sons. I am a fairly-strong train geek since early adulthood, in a mutual reinforcement with my eldest sibling who actually spent his 20s working as a unionized freight-rail conductor before going back to college and ending up with a successful career in software engineering. My eldest had the toddler-boy trains obsession at say the top of the normal range, which was naturally fun for me.
My youngest though was, from ages 2 to about 6, known among all relatives and neighbors as "the trainiest of trainy boys". Which was again fun for me! Too many anecdotes to choose but here's one: we live in Chicago, and of course rides on our L system were a solid choice for an afternoon's entertaining of the preschooler. Then I realized that O'Hare Airport has a completely different kind of train (monorail between terminals and parking lots), and is at one end of an L line....we cracked up plenty of travelers and airline personnel who noticed us just riding back and forth on that monorail.
-- "this is of course the first sign of a future great blogger", hah! Had to clean iced tea out of my keyboard after that one.
-- the toddler-parenting analogy to feudalism absolutely works and is very funny.
-- my wife and I definitely adopted toddler catchphrases as our own.
-- my work for years now has been with high-level field biologists and ecologists doing active restoration work and science, so the story about your wife reaching down to pick up the millipede will get retailed. Also “No, you can’t kill that beetle, it eats a bug which kills butterflies, which means it’s one of the good ones!” yep, that's my professional tribe. Though TBH veteran field ecologists swapping stories about their end of the day tick-removal counts can make anybody who isn't them shudder and leave the room.
-- "a horde of I-don’t-have-children-myself-buts will show up to tell me that"....as a young parent I just sighed and treated that as a price-of-doing-business. As a much-older dad the second time around I've been way closer to, just fuck right off please.
Online (like here) if somebody does that once or twice I'm just ignoring it; after that well that's what the mute-user function is for. Partly just from my getting older I'm sure (life's too damn short etc), and partly because in my experience the people who do that will never stop doing it even if asked. (They'll just switch to litigating their inalienable right to do it.) Nope, sorry, see "life's too damn short".
Love this.
As our kids have gotten older, we've been able to explain to them the reason why we paid the enforcement price for the basic rules of the family: it meant we could take them with us to trips, events, and experiences that they'd otherwise spend with the babysitter.
The justification helped us stick with the often exhausting rule explanation and negotiations, even when they were too young to understand why we did it.
"See Nana two minutes?"
Seems like a good opportunity to call Nana on Facetime (subject to considerations like time-zone differences). 😊
If I had a nickel for every nerdy online writer I liked whose wife had an education in entomology, I would have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
(The other being Zach Weinersmith).
Good stuff but this post should have been titled Seeing Like A Sire or something like that.
I suppose I inherited my love of trains from my dad. He wasn't the stereotypical train enthusiast--no rare mileage collecting, nor train photography, nor model trains of his own--but he did insist, through the 1980s, that our annual family vacation from the West Coast to the Midwest to see our extended family would be done via Amtrak, and he subscribed to both Passenger Train Journal and Rail Travel News and was a longtime member of NARP. He showed me how to estimate the train speed by timing mile markers. I think it was the repeated exposure to trains--not only riding them, but also the enhanced exposure to other trains that riding passenger trains gives you. As a child I was a full-on train enthusiast: one of my favorite books was The Big Book of Real Trains, and around second grade I saved up a bunch of money in order to buy a moderately fancy N-Scale model train layout. There was a point, around the time I was perhaps 3 years old, where I insisted my parents stop the car anytime a train went by, so I could watch the whole thing go by. I would still prefer to do that, but not over the objections to the rest of my family now, who are not as enthusiastic about trains as I am. My children (presently teens, both sons) are wonderful, but I was unable to inspire in either of them a similar fascination with trains. All kids are different, one learns, but I do think their lack of train enthusiasm is in part because of a paucity of train travel in their younger years.
This post gave me more visceral appreciation than anything I've read before of the fact that human brains evolved for politics. We don't have any kids, but we do have a border collie, and there is the same story with rules, and rituals, and if you indulge and allow her to break a rule once or twice, it means you yielded territory and she'll try to consolidate her gains.
Except that the toddlers are clearly playing this game on an entirely different level, like a dolphin next to a human olympic swimmer - both can be impressive on their own terms, but there is no doubt who was born for it as a way of life.
This is incredibly beautiful and gave me fresh eyes to see my toddler.
Also: I will attempt to assert a right in the reader/blogger feudal code to fail to mind my own business on one parenting issue so long as it is paired with a compliment. If you haven't already, I'd encourage you to transition your kids to toddler beds if they can climb out of the crib--I've known a few toddlers who got really hurt falling out of their cribs.
Wonderful! You and they are great negotiators and they are learning valuable life skills. I still remember potty training for our older son (now in his 40s) when he was about 3. We had been on a 4 hour car trip and he had a clean diaper at the end, so we knew he had control. So we sat him on the potty to use it and he threw a fit. Even claimed we wanted his dirty diaper back as an alternative. We then told him he could have some M&Ms if he used the potty. His response was to quit screaming and ask "How many?" Nary an accident after that.
Good one.
Obligatory - I have no kids of my own.
But: where did you find this community of people saying that kids must be disciplined to hell and back? Have you considered that it's just one community out of many others?
Over here, a few young parents I know are into the polar opposite fashion, and apparently in those circles you're a TERRIBLE PARENT if you ever so much as raise your voice or force a kid to do something it doesn't want to do.
Also, somewhere in the 1970s there was a parenting fashion that kids should be left alone when it's time to sleep, no soothing them if they cry. A few decades later, the local consensus is that this was highly traumatizing, and parents should bond with them and rescue them from "cry because I can't sleep" situations.
Middle ground anyone?
I, too, was forced to confront how much I overuse the word "actually"—and how much I correct and lecture—when my I found my toddlers starting every third sentence with "Atchurry, ..."
With no judgment in my heart, what material do you give them on the tablets?
May daughter is 14 months. I’m very much looking forward to chatting with her.
As far as Jewish bedtime legal codes are concerned, we grew up learning from parents and teachers that you are not allowed to speak after saying the blessing on sleep. This is a great example of what happens when your religious authorities are not celibate.
For some grievances Reddit gives about uploading ANY trace of your children to the internet, I'm kinda surprised that you freely gives us these cute photos. Unless it's another people's children all along heh.
I think the people who are fanatics about the dangers of putting photos of one's kids online are profoundly wrongheaded. Their problem is that they're busy imagining some creep masturbating to the an image of their kid. Look, most of us can be sure that in our lifetimes various creeps who have seen us or our kids in photos or in person have masturbated to sexual fantasies of us, or thought with relish about torturing us, killing us, taking us hostage, etc etc. Get over it! Part of getting over it is recognizing that in the weird corners of your mind you've had godawful fantasies yourself -- such as, for example, your fantasies of people harming your kids in unspeakable ways.
I agree that the danger is massively overstated.
But I'm also sympathetic to the viewpoint that a person has a right to their image, and that while parents have a right to make decisions about their children, they should exercise strong restraint when doing so.
As a parent of a very picky eater, I think you may be overlooking a basic fact of life:
If you eat no fiber whatsoever, you will suffer horrible, painful, health-damaging constipation.
It doesn't necessarily have to be green veggies, but they need to get it from somewhere.
We try hard to respect our children's autonomy, and allow them to negotiate when they have constructive suggestions or arguments, but we also set pretty firm boundaries when they refuse to ingest any fiber.
Ehh, kids get less picky as they get older, and they also become much more able to get themselves to do something they don't feel like doing, such as eating a few bites of a vegetable they're grossed out by. There are some things where it's best to get in there early, and start working to influence kids to be a certain way, and there are others where it's better to wait until they become more open to influence. I think eating veggies is firmly in the latter category.
Also, seems to me your vehemence is powered by an textbook example of the all-or-nothing and catastrophizing cognitive distortions: "If you eat no fiber whatsoever, you will suffer horrible, painful, health-damaging constipation." First of all, I'm pretty sure this is factually wrong. Aren't there people who tend towards loose bowels no matter what they eat?. That tendency, if powerful enough, may be a problem in and of itself but it still pops your generalization. Also, people given oxycodone and pain killers are routinely told to take Senokot and Miralax daily, and doing that generally overcomes the very powerful constipating effect of the oxy. I'll bet it would also work for the hypothetical wretch in your mind who eats zero fiber.
And besides, there are lots of things most kids and adults love that provide fiber: nuts, nut butters, popcorn, cheerios, fruit smoothies . .
The wretch is not in my mind, nor hypothetical, alas.
It did not reach the worst documented states, but for one of my children, persistent refusal to ingest fiber and fighting against our efforts to get them to eat it had consequences that have lasted a decade and may never go away entirely.
I readily grant that I overgeneralized, and that it's possible there are people whose bowels can handle a fiberless diet just fine.
I have excellent firsthand evidence that not everyone can, however.
Great article, thank you.
I think there are a number of other works of art that mention the phenomenon raised here from Hiawatha. "These are the days of our lives" by Queen comes to mind.
My six year old teaches my two year old to bargain harder and for more minutes than she was originally willing to accept, unfortunately :-(
oh no, they're sharing praxis
Your kids are just ridiculously, objectively adorable. I wanted to tell you this in case you privately suspected that your beliefs on this subject were just your genes being happy at having been propogated.
Given your son's (genetic?) obsession with trains, it seems like a cruel punishment for him to grow up in 21st century California.
True, he should move to Switzerland. Standing near Zurich main station is truly a sight to behold.
I needed to read something that made me smile the whole time and I'm grateful for this piece.
this is so cuteeeeeeee <3333
It feels like, in all seriousness, you created a new form of art with these essays that sneak in staggeringly beautiful motifs through scientific analysis. I'm grateful I was born in the same era as you, God bless you all (wish there was a secular way to say this)
It is one thing to inculcate your culture before the age of five... but I do hope you have a tone of voice, or something, to indicate "Do as Daddy Says, NOW."
Children are constantly doing things that are unsafe, for whatever reason, and parental intervention may not be as effective if it has to go through a "two more minutes?" filter.
Mommy is usually the quick-response crisis handler, and I do have a scary tone I rarely use outside of street safety and bad climbing ideas.
Though on a particularly bad day, I managed to intone "NOT TODAY, Kai." with such chillingness that he went from whining about bedtime to immediately turning around, walking downstairs, climbing into his crib himself, and staying silent until he fell asleep.
The kids are pretty adequate at figuring out how seriously to take directions from tone. Granting them "2 minutes" for most transitions is just usually not much of an imposition.
Scott's shadow account? Or impostor?
I've been a parent since 1981. You sound like you are doing a great job as a parent. In my experience, it's a lot of negotiations, a lot of tyranny (from both directions until it isn't as necessary), a lot of arbitrariness, and the absolute best fun in the world.
I'm so glad you have kids.
Probably waaay too late in the response chain, but thinking about childhood memories from previous lives... is this really just woo? Or could there be a physical thing happening that makes this possible? Thinking about from a game theoric standpoint, the ability to pass down memories sounds like a huge plus for survival. It can't be from the parents, but it could be from the grandparents etc. And memories are just a bunch of weights and connections, a developmental process that impressed a bunch of weights on the developing brain would show up as memories. Then at some point in time a flag would be set "consolidate memories!" and the disparate echoes would (hopefully) meld into a unitary mind. Crazy? We're finding that neural development is way more complex than we thought with loops and recursions and crazy shit.
Bug tubes! I grew up with the homemade equivalent. You upend a jar over the bug, slide a piece of paper underneath to cover the opening, and dump the bug outdoors. I *still* handle bugs indoors that way, and get teased to death about it. So glad to hear about another family that just does not feel ok about stomping on the things! But I'm on the east coast and I suppose Bugtubesters are more common on the left coast.
I deal with bugs, spiders, and hymenoptera using the exact same paper-and-jar-or-cup technique, and my children have picked it up from me.
We cannot exist in this universe without an unending tower of death beneath our feet, but we can at least choose not to kill where it's only a mild inconvenience to save life.
Bug rescuers of the world, unite!
What sorts of things do they do on their tablets, and is it cultivating a healthy and intentional relationship with computing? I lament that there's no way to give them Claude. When asking Claude about this, it surfaced https://playpokpok.com , which sounds like it's essentially toys, like, active and self-directed, not overstimulating, but adapted to the touchscreen computer medium.
I used to be obsessed with dinosaurs and cars. For now, my 2yo doesn't express the same obsession, but we'll see.
1. "Feudal" is a fun way to put it. But should one go mediaeval on them? Maybe "pre-modern" - but boooring.
2. No gene for trains, but trains satisfy fascination with power and order - perfect bait for an OCD-kid. See Simon *Baron-Cohen's work on the cognitive style "systemizing".
*Yep, the comedian's cousin.
Wonderful, sweet, fun, and informative -- and I'm 78, have raised two boys, and love being with our grandson who is 11 years old and lives too far away but who we made the effort to be with a lot more when he was preschool and found every moment fascinating. I'm happy for you and your family and appreciate the sharing. Thanks.
Hey Scott, I hesitated a long time about writing this, not wanting to come across as a pushy know it all, but I’ve decided to do it.
As you have may have picked up, I’m a psychologist who treats OCD, and I'd like to cast a vote in favor of your starting to intervene when your son does OCD-ish things like close the closet door over and over. All kids have funny little quirks about things having to be done a certain way, but in your son’s case I think you should be cautious about giving quirks like this room to grow.. You think your son has a mind sort of like yours, and OCD is heritable — so given all that, I think your wonderful little guy actually is at pretty significant risk for OCD himself. But his neuroplasticity is huge right now, and my intuition is that at this stage it might be possible to just nip OCD in the bud, or at least to install something that forever nips any budding OCD that pops up in him at the stage when it's still young and fragile.
If you were to try to do that, I’d say do it with a very light hand at this point. Fold it in with other things you’re encouraging him to grow out of, stuff like using a diaper instead of the potty, or climbing on things where there’s a risk he could get hurt. So you just talk about the advantages of restraining himself from doing the thing he feels like doing. If he uses the potty instead of the diaper, he saves everyone some clean-up time, plus he’s acting more like a big kid. If he doesn’t let himself stand on the back of that armchair, he saves himself from a fall that’s going to hurt. You could compare the door-closing to the armchair-standing, identifying both as things that are going to have a bad outcome sometimes. Tell him sometimes people who like to do something over and over start craving to do it a whole lot, and then doing it uses up a bunch of their time, plus it makes the people who see them think they are silly.
If you wanted to go further, you could try to get him to identify why he does it, and how he decides to stop. He is likely to tell you he does it til he gets a good “feels right” feeling, and then you can say something like, “oh yeah, there are lots of things like that in life. I have some, but I wish I didn’t because they’re a nuisance. Everybody has some — like for instance when I say it’s bed time you and your sister both don’t think the idea of going to bed feels right.” Then for a while talk with him now and then about his day, and times when it felt right to do something, and times when circumstances forced him to do something that didn’t feel right, and how that all worked out. The point of this is to introduce the idea that he is able to restrain himself from continuing to do something it feels right to do, and the restraint doesn’t feel all that bad, and life goes on afterwards and life is good.
You could at some point progress to practicing with him doing little things that are a bit hard, but bearable, like holding a cookie right in front of his mouth but not biting into it for a while, or jumping up & down to the point that he’s sick and tired of doing it, then jumping 5 more times. Congratulate him when he succeeds. So now you’re teaching him it’s good sometimes to push yourself to do something that feels a bit bad. And then you could start working on cutting down on the number of closet door closings, and congratulate him on his successes. Given that it's repetitions that he likes, I think the goal should be One Closing. Or occasionally, as an exercise, Zero -- leave the damn thing open. Life will continue, and life will continue to be good, with an open closet door.
OK, I’m done. I hope you’re not offended, Scott.
First of all....what godforsaken element on this page is playing sound when I hit the space bar? (Needs to be the full page, not the comments page.)
Second, I'm amazed at the idea of closing doors in your own house when you leave the room. All doors in every place I've ever lived stay open at all times except for privacy considerations, or maybe to avoid heating/cooling sometimes. Turn out the lights, maybe, if you're being very dad-like (but I don't bother with that during the day).
Video chat might satisfy a "See Nana" request.
Disgraced comedian Bill Cosby on "the mother's curse": may you one day have children that act just like you.
https://youtu.be/ODyjiCsuBII?si=piCfoADMssZZpI5v
I once worked with a guy who was very liberal. So I assume he was ideologically allergic to any sort of genetic determinism. Nonetheless his verdict was that having kids made you believe in the power of nature over nurture.
This is interesting. My son, when he was around three years old, was fascinated with subway trains. I used to take him to the 14th Street subway station so he could watch them come and go. When we were on a local and passed by another train, he would shriek out "Express!" I also used to take the number seven train with him out to the train yard near the old Shea Stadium so I could show him where all the trains spent the night. Who would have thought that the New York City subway system would be the best place to take your kid?
For me and my son it was tractors, not trains. But it was around age 2-3, and we didn't reach any level of expertise, just liked watching them.
Genetically, it can't be that the father's traits go to the son and the mother's to the daughter, right? Unless they're all on the Y/X chromosomes.
This is lovely. The hiawatha bit is wonderful.
You might want to swap the boy out of the crib and into a bed. If he can climb out of the crib, the crib isn't helping. But by climbing out, he could fall and injure himself.