Private schooling appears to be associated with better outcomes but also with being from a richer household. Would you consider splitting out the results of upper-middle and rich to see if the benefits of private still hold?
The point of this kind of analysis is either to find some blindingly obviously large effect or to conclude that there is no such effect. Trying to do subgroup analysis on vague terms like upper-middle class vs. rich seems pretty useless in this context.
It's not a vague term - it's something captured in the survey. The point was to not to analyze between rich and upper middle class but to remove the confounder of household wealth or class from choice of private vs public schooling - thus "and". I thought that was obvious. I don't think its useless if we are interested in the impact of school choice on outcomes.
Hmmmm if I were to homeschool my future kids, one of the primary motivations would be so they wouldn't be brainwashed into being trans... But this shows that that homeschooled kids are the most likely to go trans
No. "Using a national sample of United States adolescents, we found that there were more TGD (transgender and gender diverse) AMAB adolescents than TGD AFAB adolescents in both 2017 and 2019. Additionally, the total percentage of TGD adolescents in our sample decreased from 2.4% in 2017 to 1.6% in 2019. This decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as TGD is incongruent with an ROGD hypothesis that posits social contagion."
Thanks for sharing that! Sometimes a critical point can be lost in a sea of comments. And even if people see and appreciate a point, the poster is unlikely to know here, bereft of a 'like' or 'upvote' signal.
Thanks for the link, I should have read the study more carefully before posting it! It's disappointing that something so apparently poorly put together could pass peer review (yes I know, it's very flawed, but even so). That said, the original ROGD paper sounds worse.
Try another one, with a smaller clinical population, and a different definition of rapid-onset gender dysphoria: "a phenomenon in youth with gender dysphoria emerging at or after puberty, socially influenced through peer contagion, and with contributing factors including poor mental health, neurodevelopmental disabilities, parent-child conflict, and maladaptive coping strategies" - not based on which gender and sex was involved. They asked the question whether a more recent realisation of a trans identity in adolescents was associated with "self-reported mental health measures, mental health and neurodevelopmental disability diagnoses, behaviors consistent with maladaptive coping (eg, self-harm), support from online and/or transgender friends but not parents, and lesser gender dysphoria." They did not find support for these associations in a clinical population. The research was carried out by people from the Trans Youth CAN! research team, so there is obviously potential for bias there. https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(21)01085-4/fulltext
Probably because historically MTFs got more exposure, but now that FTMs are getting exposure, people with relatively mild dysphoria are more likely to realize that transitioning is an option.
There is literally no evidence that rapid onset gender dysphoria exists. The only study that purports to show it is Lisa Littman's study, which posted surveys on ROGD websites to ask parents about their kids' ROGD. There are two glaring flaws with that study, either of which alone would completely invalidate it. First, it's a study about the inner lives of adolescents and young adults that's based entirely on the reports of parents, a demographic that's notoriously clueless about the inner lives of adolescents and young adults. Second, Littman's sample consisted entirely of people on ROGD websites, so of course they said it existed! This is a bit like trying to determine the shape of the Earth by posting a survey on the Flat Earth Society Forums.
Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
>This is a bit like trying to determine the shape of the Earth by posting a survey on the Flat Earth Society Forums.
Supposing someone posted a survey on a pro-trans website asking "do you believe transgenderism exists?" I suspect most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative. Do you think the act of me posting the survey on a pro-trans website invalidates the results of the survey? (Per Scott, this is called "proving too much" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/)
The difference between this question and the flat Earth question (which seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but here we are) is that the shape of the Earth can be directly observed: 99% of the population believing the earth was flat wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to its actual shape. Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
So no, the ROGD question isn't remotely like the flat Earth question.
>Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
Nobody is qualified to offer informed speculation about a person's inner life besides the person in question, and that includes the person's parents. So Littman should have talked to people who supposedly have ROGD, but she never talked to one.
>Supposing someone posted a survey on a pro-trans website asking "do you believe transgenderism exists?" I suspect most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative.
The difference is that transgender people have direct access to their own inner lives.
>The difference between this question and the flat Earth question (which seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but here we are) is that the shape of the Earth can be directly observed: 99% of the population believing the earth was flat wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to its actual shape. Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
Sure, if the person's behavior includes answering questions about their inner life! If you were trying to determine the shape of the Earth, you would actually study the Earth instead of asking people about it, and if you were trying to determine if ROGD exists, you would hopefully talk to people who supposedly have it instead of asking their parents.
99% of people not believing in gender dysphoria wouldn't make it any less real to the people who have it. So if you want to learn about a person's inner experiences, you should ask that person.
>Nobody is qualified to offer informed speculation about a person's inner life besides the person in question
Do you think people can ever be honestly mistaken about their inner experiences? I certainly do. In such cases, we may need to instead substitute testimony from an individual close to that person, who knows them very well and cares about their welfare.
Even if you think that survey responses from the individuals in question is the gold standard, that doesn't imply that survey responses from the individuals' parents are *completely* worthless. They could well be the next best thing.
Besides, several of the questions on Littman's survey had nothing to do with the inner experiences of the teenagers in question and were simple factual questions like "has your child been diagnosed with a developmental disorder or mental illness?" or "did your child express a non-heterosexual sexual orientation prior to coming out as trans?" If you think parents aren't qualified to answer the question of whether their child has ever been diagnosed with autism or depression, I don't know what to tell you.
>So Littman should have talked to people who supposedly have ROGD, but she never talked to one.
I know this isn't quite the same thing, but do you accept the self-reported inner experiences of desistors and detransitioners who assert things like "At one point I sincerely believed I was transgender, but now believe I was mistaken" or "At one point I was suffering from gender dysphoria, but no longer am"?
>The difference is that transgender people have direct access to their own inner lives.
I didn't say "most of the respondents (who are themselves transgender) would answer in the affirmative". I said "most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative", without specifying the respondents' gender identity.
Put it another way: if Littman had posted her survey on a website for the parents of trans children, and a majority of the respondents (who are themselves cisgender) said they sincerely believed that their child was transgender, would your response be "that's ridiculous, no one can know whether someone is really transgender except the person themselves"? Somehow I doubt it; I suspect that instead you'd be praising the parents for uncritically "affirming" their children's stated gender identity. You're dismissing this survey, not on the basis of its methodology, but because it didn't give you the answer you wanted.
>Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
Most people in their peer group? I mean, sure, *some* parents are in tune with their kids' lives, but most parents are pretty clueless as to their kids actual lives. Take drug use, something we have good data on[1]:
>One in 10 parents surveyed believed their own teenage child had used alcohol during the previous year. And just one in 20 believed their teen had smoked marijuana.
>Teens themselves reported a much higher rate of substance use in a separate poll released late last year. About half of 10th-graders said they had used alcohol over the previous 12 months; about one in 4 (28%) reported marijuana use.
Off by a factor of five in both cases. And this is something that should have physical, observable effects. And it's not like parents have low priors on substance use:
>More than half of the parents polled in the latest survey believed general alcohol use among teens -- other than their children -- was higher than reflected in the earlier poll and about a third overestimated marijuana use among other teens.
Parents, in general, are in pretty heavy denial that there's anything "wrong" with their kids, and have a poor understanding of the reality their adolescent children's live. Hell, I can't tell you the number of depressed adolescents and teens I knew (some of whom were ideating suicide) whose parents were totally oblivious or even actively in denial.
It's a fair point, but I might also point out that we shouldn't automatically take kids' word for it either. Teenagers may falsely claim to have used alcohol or drugs in hopes of seeming cool. This was illustrated by the "video nasties" scandal in the UK, in which many schoolchildren earnestly claimed to have seen horror films which *didn't exist*. Even speaking anecdotally, I'm sure everyone had a classmate in secondary school prone to telling tall tales about how sexually active they were.
> Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
The experience itself isn't even very informative. One cannot actually differentiate from a first person perspective the difference between the qualia of "I am actually experiencing the qualia of the opposite sex" and "I mistakenly think I am experience the qualia of the opposite sex". The best that can be done is guesswork. It's very hard for me to imagine this guess would not be heavily influenced by social environment. I'm not even convinced gender as felt phenomenon is coherent outside of a social framework.
>I'm not even convinced gender as felt phenomenon is coherent outside of a social framework.
I disagree - some trans men report phantom penises, similar to amputees' phantom limbs, and that certainly doesn't seem like something that would arise from a social framework - but even if that's true, gender is a felt phenomenon that has a huge effect on some people's quality of life. If someone really wants to have breasts for some reason and is miserable without them, then I don't care why.
I absolutely had ROGD from ages 23-26 or so, and subsequently grew out of it. I was depressed and self-hating, had a lot of trans friends/trans ideology exposure, and began to believe I was a trans man. Fortunately I did not take T (though I wanted to, desperately, for a while). After some deep introspection I realized that my depression was making the idea of becoming a new person an all-consuming obsession. I got some therapy, found a boyfriend and realized I really liked vanilla heterosexual sex, and my gender dysphoria basically went away.
So ROGD definitely *exists.* The question is to what degree.
I think you should be careful with claims that there is "literally no evidence" for some controversial proposition. In the Bayesian sense, even the mere fact that there is a term called ROGD is evidence that it exists.
Obviously, there is a big expansion in the number of adolescent girls suddenly declaring themselves to be boys or nonbinary or whatever, since roughly that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2015. There are countless sources of evidence that this is a huge fad. Some of them were always tomboys, but a lot had been normal girly girls, which is a new social construct.
>Obviously, there is a big expansion in the number of adolescent girls suddenly declaring themselves to be boys or nonbinary or whatever, since roughly that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2015.
Historically MTFs got more exposure than FTMs, and thus biological males were more likely to realize transitioning was an option than females. Now FTMs are getting more exposure, so the number of trans men in America is almost as high as the number of trans women. That's not evidence that it's a fad - transgender rates for both men and women have been steadily increasing since the mid-1900s and show no sign of going down.
If by "that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians" you mean Caitlyn Jenner, she's a trans woman, so why would girls transition to male just to imitate her?
>There are countless sources of evidence that this is a huge fad.
Like what?
>Some of them were always tomboys, but a lot had been normal girly girls, which is a new social construct.
Seemingly manly men have been suddenly coming out as trans women for decades - Jenner is an excellent example. This is simply the opposite sex version of that. Trans men have gotten less exposure in previous decades than trans women, so of course less stereotypical trans men got even less exposure.
It's very clear among my nieces' social group that gender diversity is the ultimate trendy thing. I get the impression of it being like having a favourite colour. It sounds like 2/3rds of the girls are 'non-straight'
You don't really get that much of a say in your kid's gender expression, sexuality, etc. Even if some styles of raising them, or some environments, might make them more likely to repress themselves and stay in the closet forever, any effect there will be marginal, and mostly evaporate once they leave the nest.
What you have much more of a say in is whether they'll still talk to you after discovering who they are.
Well, if a person really wants to be X, even though the path is hard and inconvinient just from the mere fact that they can be X in principle, then the conventional wisdom is that the person already had a strong disposition towards wanting to be X.
Do you believe that majority of boys have a strong disposition towards wanting to be women (and vice versa) so that they need to be kept in dark about the possibility?
I would put it more like some nonzero % of people go through some very difficult times around gender and fitting in as teens and it is a bad idea to present them with life long altering options during this period as a method of coping. On top of that some non-zero % of people just like to do whatever will piss off the "squares" as much as possible, and right now this is sort of the last redoubt. Coming home with piercings or tattoos won't do it anymore.
I absolutely think there are non-negligible social costs to the phenomenon and that for most (though not all) transitioning is probably an aggregate negative decision in terms of life satisfaction if you removed all the social pressure there is to lie about such things and the rationalizing people do after making non-reversable changes.
> I would put it more like some nonzero % of people go through some very difficult times around gender and fitting in as teens
Trivially true. And some of these people are trans, while others have other reasons for not fitting in.
> it is a bad idea to present them with life long altering options during this period
Going trough default puberty is life long altering option. Modern trans activists would really want an option for the people who don't want it not to do it.
> On top of that some non-zero % of people just like to do whatever will piss off the "squares"
I'd like to see some evidence that this contributes to gender transitions in any way before seriously entertaining this idea.
> I absolutely think there are non-negligible social costs to the phenomenon
This cuts both ways. Modern pressure not to change your gender is still much much higher than to change it. As long as absolute majority of transitions successfully improve the QOL and the rate of false positives is tiny we seem to be on the right track.
I'm definitely not the only trans person whose familial reception to coming out was something like "why couldn't you have been merely gay instead, we could have handled that just fine!" Many Such Cases.
Of course, for those who already didn't like their family much to begin with, this reaction has something of the opposite intended effect. I wouldn't say it was a __primary motivation__ or anything - lotsa other easier ways to spite one's face - but it's definitely in the Pro rather than Con column. Being that-which-is-detested-at-some-fundamental-level is an excellent excuse to keep unwanted blood relations at a safe arm's length...for their own benefit as much as mine.
Counterpoint in fairness: this also deters me to some degree from detransitioning, which I entertain from time to time. I __really__ don't want to give The Haters the satisfaction of being proven right. There's some real Pride at stake in assembling a functional life versus a largely-indifferent-or-hostile world, even if it's an unhappy one...sunk cost fallacy is a big thing, even outside monetary decisions. (I'm more wary of claiming generalization here, since I was never "very trans" to begin with.)
So in conclusion, the opinions of "squares" do have some non-negligible degree of influence. And this seems uncontroversial with reversed sign, that external disapproval is a common cause of detransitoning.
That gender can be altered is just a fact. If I tell my child about gravity does that prevent her from being able to fly? Parents are in particular control of these natural processes.
Depends on how you define "men" and "women." What is a fact is that most secondary sex characteristics can be altered with hormones, and primary sex characteristics can be altered with surgery. That leaves only internal sex organs, which don't always work even in people who aren't transgender, and chromosomes, which no one's going to know about without a DNA test.
Look. We can taboo the phrase "becoming women" if you like, and it'll still Just Be A Fact that men can go through a series of social, and optionally surgical, processes whereby which they'll look more like women, and a vast section of the population will agree to treat them as though they were women. That's a choice that they can make.
I don't doubt the sincerity of your insistence on defining "man" and "woman" based on chromosomes — but I don't think it's actually the root of your discomfort with transgenderism, and I think it's needless obfuscation to come back to it as though it were the core of the issue. Or would everything be fine and dandy for you if everything else about the transition process were the same, except that ""trans women"" now acknowledged, if asked, that of *course* they were technically men?
If you're uncomfortable with the thought of a child of yours undergoing hormone therapy and extensive surgery that aren't necessary for their physical health — well, just say that. It may or may not be "correct", but it's an obviously valid and respectable feeling for a (prospective) parent to experience. Being a stickler for chromosomes is really neither here nor there, and just makes you come across as pedantic instead of sincerely concerned.
(You might also be uncomfortable with the mere thought of a son of yours wearing dresses and lipstick and speaking in a high-pitched voice, surgery or no surgery. And while I think taking those feelings as reflective of some grand moral truth would be heavily misguided — they're *still* more obviously heartfelt and natural and sympathetic than chromosomal pedantry!)
"it'll still Just Be A Fact that men can go through a series of social, and optionally surgical, processes whereby which they'll look more like women, and a vast section of the population will agree to treat them as though they were women"
I do not agree to treat them as though they were women, because they are not women. The vast majority of people in the world today agree with my opinion. Would you agree to treat me like a chimpanzee just because I dress like a chimpanzee, eat like a chimpanzee, and convinced a plastic surgeon to mutilate my body to be more like a chimpanzee's? If I insisted that I'm a real chimpanzee and that I'd be offended at any suggestion otherwise, wouldn't you think I was either delusional, mocking you, or insulting your intelligence? If there was a sudden spike in the number of people identifying as chimpanzee and mutilating themselves accordingly, wouldn't you see it as a contagious mental illness that needs to be stopped, not a praiseworthy movement to be encouraged?
Seriously: Second comment here saying the same thing. Raising them to believe anything is not going to work if they are the sort of person who questions what they are told. It just won't.
Unfortunately you are just going to need to hope that your kid turns out well, and you are might need to accept that what 'turning out well' means to them might not be what you had in mind.
It would be strange if this were true since parenting can lastingly effect most forms of behaviour. Of course it can't effect genetics, but I think it's well established that sexuality isn't genetic. I haven't seen anything on whether trans has a genetic component (maybe everyone trying to study it got beaten up by at least one of the trans and anti-trans lobbies).
Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, but they theorize that it is the result of a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences.[1][3][4] They do not view sexual orientation as a choice.[1][3][5]
Quoting ENWP on culture war issues is a good way to start a fight and a poor way to win anyone over; the facts that most conservative media are "deprecated", alt-rightists are actively purged (WP:No Nazis is *technically* not policy, but it might as well be since they ban on the basis of it) and tradcons are not-very-online do tend to tell.
This doesn't make the statement false, but seriously, if you want to convince anti-SJers of something, using WP won't work. We see it as hopelessly compromised on CW issues (actually, most of us see it as hopelessly compromised in general; I have to remind people quite frequently that *outside* CW issues it's great).
All psychological traits are influenced by genes and environment. All traits are heritable but not 100%. These are some of the most well-replicated findings of behavioral genetics.
Sexuality and transgenderism are influenced by genes and environment.
I am not sure which behavior you’re thinking of but parental influence on behavior later in life is typically overestimated.
I just looked at a review paper one day (but now can't find it) that said the best evidence we have suggests that gender dysphoria develops in the mother's womb. In this case parenting of course can't affect much. If someone can find the paper, please let us know.
Anyway, even if it starts before birth, there are two sides of the coin: a) many kids with GD "grow out of it" later and decide that they don't want to change sex after all, and later they are more happy with life than their peers who did change. And b) kids with strong GD are utterly miserable and make horrible numbers of suicide attempts. These kids get happier and stop trying to kill themselves if they get to change sex. So here we have a difficult and tragic situation: if we let them all easily transfer we'll cause some of them live less satisfying lives later. And if we conceal that possibility from them, we'll have a number of them suffer horrible misery and lose some lives. So of course the correct action is not "never let your kids know that transitioning is possible" and also not "let them easily transition at their whim". The correct way is a difficult process of making sure if they are really suffering horribly and only then letting them change; and this of course gives a lot of false positives and false negatives and we'll still lose a lot of them. I hope AI diagnostics will some day save us from this.
The 'suicide' argument is pretty spurious. GD isn't an isolated disorder, it is accompanied by depression, anxiety and other highly negative mental problems. Disambiguating the effects of those from GD is a non-starter.
But what's your plan then? Most of the suiciders are probably on antidepressants already. If their anxiety and depression are related to their GD then how would you treat their mood without dealing with GD? I'm assuming that you don t consider all GD to be a secondary result of other mood problems. What's the plan?
The intervention for GD used to be 'wait and see' since 90% of sufferers recover naturally by their early 20's. It is only in the last decade that a medication-first approach has been introduced with baleful, lifelong consequences for many sufferers. This is why the UK NHS and other European health services are now reverting back to the traditional treatment.
> I hope AI diagnostics will some day save us from this.
I should imagine that by the time A.I. was good enough to do that reliably, we'd also be in enough of a technological utopia that transitioning back and forth would cease to be an issue, i.e. you could flawlessly transition and detransition more or less at will.
Is there much evidence that parenting actually lastingly affects any form of behavior? As I recall, many things that people expect are the result of parenting actually have a large genetic component, while peer environment has more effect on behavior than parenting.
"What you have much more of a say in is whether they'll still talk to you after discovering who they are"
I see this sanctimonious little messaging in a lot of places, and it always irritates me. Usually because the person posting it would have a completely different reaction if it went the other way.
A - my parents cut me out of their lives and won't even talk to me anymore because they claim they're disappointed in me. They refuse to accept me for who I am!
Response - the monsters, they're toxic, you're better off without them, anyone who decides to cut off family contact just because you think differently to them is not someone who understands what it means to be family, they're not your real parents (and so on and so forth)
B - I've decided to cut my parents out of my lives and not even talk to them anymore. I have to be who I am and if they can't handle that, too bad!
Response- so brave and stunning and valid! you are a champion! you don't have to live with toxicity and if that means cutting off contact then that is what you have to do, if they can't change their minds about how they think then that's on them (and so on and so forth).
Maybe the parents don't want to talk to the kids, either? Maybe they'll be happier if the source of turmoil and distress in their lives is gone?
This cuts both ways. If parents are expected to unconditionally love and support their children no matter what, then the children have to do some accepting and tolerating too. Parents do have hopes and expectations for their children, and it's hard when those don't work out.
Too many of these kinds of posts that I read are all "I am owed EVERYTHING in the world, but I don't owe anything back in return!"
Absolutely there are different expectations and norms for what is okay in a parent/child relationship.
I see people saying "you should work to pay for your child's food", but if you force your child to work to make money for the household, suddenly people get up in arms about child labor or something. Totally different reaction the other way, huh?
Parents do have a responsibility to raise the child they have birthed into this world until that child's independent, and for that duration, it indeed does not cut both ways because the child is dependent and not mentally mature.
Once the child's independent and mature (varies, but often around 25), then I'm fine with children or parents deciding that the relationship is toxic and stepping back from it, regardless of the fictional view you've put in my mouth.
A parent creates their child and has enormous power over them for at least a decade and a half. Imagine thinking that doesn't impact the relationship in any way.
Children aren't owed everything in the world, and owe quite a bit to the world in return. They are owed everything their parents have to give and they owe nothing to their parents. Sorry.
"They are owed everything their parents have to give and they owe nothing to their parents."
No wonder moderns are not having kids but own pets instead. Much less hassle, much more dependable return of affection.
Children owe *nothing* to their parents? At all? Not to be abusive to them? Not to steal anything that's not nailed down to feed a drug habit? Not to be in a reciprocal relationship of affection but instead be a giant, entitled, perpetual toddler?
Ok slight overstatement - children owe the same duty of care to their parent as they do to any passerby on the street. No they don't have an entitlement to steal from and abuse them, but they also have no duty to maintain a relationship with them. That's not perpetual toddlerdom, it's the opposite. It's growing up. I have a good relationship with my parents but it's certainly not built on a sense of duty to them. Rather I appreciate their kindness and effectiveness in raising me and think of them as a resource. Like with my friends that also makes me want to be a resource to them. A relationship built on love, not duty.
But going the other way is different. Obviously in addition to love I have a duty to my daughter. Otherwise she'd die.
There's a lot of cultural variation in notions of whether and what parents owe children and children owe parents. It seems to me there's no one correct standard to even argue for.
It sounds like you have a clear idea for what you think is rightly owed in either direction of the parent/child relationship. Even in this one weird country I live in (the U.S.), subcultures of class, ethnicity, geography, specific family history show widely varying expectations around this. Notorious edge cases include things like are kids owed a college education paid for if parents can afford (or borrow) to pay, do parents have a duty to pay or help pay for things like addictions counseling, legal fees when kids get in trouble with the law, wedding expenses, or for various kind of enrichment experiences. That's just the money owed sense of it and obviously it gets way more variable when it comes to emotional support/boundaries -- rights of grandparents to visit grandkids, rights of parents to express opinions about how their grown children parent, what a parent feels a child owes a stepparent in terms of respect or emotional connection, what fathers and mothers feel they're owed differently, etc.
It seems to me Walrus isn't wrong, you're not wrong, Mek's not wrong and what each parent/child pair feel owed or feel they owe is going to get negotiated in each context. There's no objectively right way in this and it's been widely contentious for a really long time.
Agree that it's more complex than I'm making it (by a lot!) but get extremely irritated by folks who equate adult children choosing not to have a relationship with their parents to a parent cutting off a child. Having just had a child of my own, and having worked with folks who have had parents voluntarily end the relationship, it's not at all equivalent. An adult who chooses not to have a relationship with their parents is being hurtful, but a certain amount of separation is expected (in the U.S.) and even encouraged. A parent who chooses not to have a relationship with their adult child is crippling a life they brought into the world emotionally, materially, and spiritually.
Especially in the context of "discouraging lifestyles I disagree with," it's completely understandable for an adult whose parents do not support the things that make them happy to choose not to associate with those parents.
I don’t have a great argument for rejecting your perspective. It’s intuition all the way down. Imo children of parents who weren’t negligent or cruel owe everything to their parents, and parents of adult children have lesser duties to them.
I’m childless though so obviously much less informed than you.
Is there any evidence that would convince you you are wrong about this? Because it seems to be unfalsifiable, any lack of evidence is just evidence it's being suppressed.
Guessing that if this survey was done 20 years in future the results would look very different. When today’s readers were growing up there was almost no discussion in public schools around gender transition.
I believe both that “brainwashing” can have a significant effect on a child's decisions but that the main cause of homeschooled kids becoming queer is that their parents where unconventional in the first place.
If you are a normie, your further decision to homeschool your kids will not affect that.
If I really didn't want my children to become transsexual I would do the usual of protective factors against autism (not have children late, good diet for the mother etc.)
However I have a second, extremely politically incorrect hypothesis that transsexuality is mostly caused through social isolation, the contact with trans ideology happens almost always in extremely eternally online circles, like niche discords, niche gaming communites (speedrunning, fighting games), niche music (bunch of super niche metal analysts or musicians became trans). It is always social isolation and too much time spent before the computer screen that predates gender change in my observation. It isn't quite sound, but if you are seriously worried about this the best think would be to just make sure that the kid has a normal social life, which is great for a thousand other reasons aswell...
I know almost nothing about ftm transgender except that it is most likely more common than mtf transgender and drastically underreported on because all the reactionaries only care about theis sons cutting their dicks off. I am however open to the idea that ftm transgender follows different mechanics than ftm transgender.
"I know almost nothing about ftm transgender except that it is most likely more common than mtf transgender"
Historically not the case, so far as I understand
"because all the reactionaries only care about their sons cutting their dicks off"
Whereas being fine with your daughter cutting her tits off is better?
Given that transgenderism seems to cluster along with a lot of mental health problems, convince me that it is not a mental illness. "Grr argh fascist" is not an argument.
> Given that transgenderism seems to cluster along with a lot of mental health problems, convince me that it is not a mental illness
Plenty of things correlate with mental health issues. Having chronic pain? You bet that correlates with depression. Bullied in school? Obviously. Sexually abused as a child? Yup, that can cause trauma.
By the bar of "correlates with mental health problems", we'd have to classify everything from "being in debt" to "childhood trauma" as a mental illness. That does not seem very convincing to me.
To use the phraseology of the OP, having chronic pain does not correlate with "cutting your dick off". I submit that wanting to cut your dick off is not a healthy or normal signal.
> cluster along with a lot of mental health problems
[Semi-ironically]
It is also cluster along with high-functional autism which is how actual mental health looks like, so there.
> convince me that it is not a mental illness.
There is some specific mental condition which can be looked at as a part of neuro-divergent spectrum. There is some physiological reason why people are trans, or rather why they experience bodily dysphoria. And thus you can look at dysphoria as a disease and gender transition as a way to cure it. Not sure what this changes other than the fact that we now agree that gender-correcting procedures are supposed to be part of the universal healthcare.
You would want proof that gender transition is an effective cure for dysphoria though, and idk if that exists. It's a hell of a series of surgeries and hormonal supplements that wreck your body to get the benefit for a placebo effect .
I doubt it is monocausal, I am sure there are a variety of reasons people transition. I do think it is worth diving into why it is growing so quickly. In the past (~20 years ago) in my circles it really seemed mostly the method of cope by female abuse victims. Girls who had had horrible relationships with men, and wanted to retreat into a different identity because being a girl sucked. Then once they had a good relationship suddenly the desire evaporated (this includes someone who was "trans" for years and months from starting hormones/surgery). Now that is anecdata, but it always made sense to me.
Didn't have any experience with MTF so have less thoughts about that. It does seem to be consuming/overlapping a bit with the gay community.
My sister-in-law I would bet huge money on would identify as trans if she was a teen today. A bit autistic, struggled in school, always very butch (worked as a carpenter for a while), but in the most passive feminine way.
Was in love with another close female friend for a decade or more. Was living with a stoner loser guy that whole time platonically, and they still live together today 10 years later semi-platonically (I think there is now something romantic there) despite her identifying as a lesbian. As far as I know she has maybe never actually dated a woman.
You are onto something there. I am currently digging into Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) because the US army thinks it can be used to prevent the Obesity epidemic (https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/186/3-4/344/6006387, there are a bunch of papers more if you follow the trail).
IPT has a huge focus on your social role, they basically have four categories of errors which lead to various mental illnesses like depression (or for the army Loss of Control (Loc) eating), two of these failure conditions are loss of a social role and being challenged in your social role, with therapeutic maneuvers that include mourning the loss of a role and accepting the new one, or resolving intra-role challenges.
If social roles are so important for people that their brains go bust if they lose one, it only makes sense that being the loser of a social role (man who has no family, no influence, no power no nothing OR woman who has no family, no man, no social network, no connections) is a somewhat unbearable standpoint, as you are locked into a role you are thoroughly failing at. As such a "role reversal", a wiping clean of the slate, may be attractive for these persons.
There is another thing which I picked up in anti-woke Marxist circles, they say that capitalism inherently will offer more and more specialised micro roles, in which the subject is reframed into the perfect consumer through an infinite array of possible identities which all are inherently subject to the systems of capitalism. Not that I necessarily buy into Marxist theory, but it is interesting to keep that theory in mind.
> However I have a second, extremely politically incorrect hypothesis
Alternative, and quite obvious, common sense explanation is that the causation is reversed. Trans kids have troubles fitting in IRL, thus spend a lot of time online, hanging out with the people with the same niche interests.
It's sort of depressing to be reading your hypothesis on niche blog ACX (at 6AM...at least it's not on my phone?) while listening to Scandinavian metal and building MtG decks. And also remembering that the first people I came out to...were my Extremely Online MMO buddies, who knew for almost a decade before my irl friend (singular) and family.
Although, for the record, I learned of the concept via Wikipedia. Sex ed in my school/family was...ehm...lacking. There were some feeble attempts to found a chapter of Gay-Straight Alliance at my highschool, but they got laughed off campus. "We don't have any of those here!" (Narrator voice: Everyone became LGBT once they left for college.)
Now I am moderatly entertained that a bunch of cis people attack the hypothesis and the one trans person meets it perfectly. I have almost zero interaction with trans people or even lgbt irl (allegedly the former best friend of the sister of one of my friends became trans, but I have never even seen her in person). However the extremely online people I know know way more transsexuals than me, and my normie friends know even less (never even heard of one!). This got me thinking if maybe trans is related to social isolation or extreme online behaviour.
It is a bit cruel of a question, but because of the other IPT comment I wrote, did you feel like you failed at your previous gender role before transitioning?
Btw, green player here, hyped for toxic in green in ONE.
I do think part of the causality issue is that...if a trans person doesn't pass very well, or is otherwise fearful of being publically out, then of course you'll only know them at arm's-length through the Internet, if at all. Social life funges against personal risk, and all that. Conversely if they're at an advanced level...it's referred to in-community as "going stealth", of not bothering to identify oneself as trans outside ~any circumstances., even to other LGBT people. A somewhat rarefied bunch, but they're out there, confounding heuristics. Like I'm way more explicitly out here than anywhere in IRL...people generally can't tell, and if they mistake me for a gay dude instead, I don't bother correcting them. Just another unremarkable cashier at the grocery store either way, albeit one with strange fashion tastes. Thus contributing to "I don't know any trans people" in my own small way.
Hmm, yes, that's a plausible hypothesis I'd entertain. I've thought sometimes that if I were significantly more masculine, things woulda turned out differently...had romantic success ever, had better outlets for exercise (I actually don't hate sports and have some athletic/gym talent potential, but getting hazed in boys' locker rooms does a lot to beat such aspirations outta you), had better male role models. Most of the other guys I knew growing up were also loser nerds like me, or they were hulking football-team ogres who...seemed to revel in stupidity. Not exactly attractive paths to take! So it seemed logical to just nope outta that dynamic and choose a different character class. There wasn't really a thing like "nonbinary" at the time, so Doing Something Else Which Is Not That meant...female.
In similar vein, there's a pretty close Everett branch where I just end up being a typical gay guy instead. Good chunk of the same access to feminine mannerisms and fashion, less radical changes, greater acceptability, much better social prospects. Sadly I was raised in a pretty homophobic environment, so that never seemed like an acceptable choice until far, far too late. Didn't even realize I also liked boys until well into transition...
I guess it's weird in some ways to frame it as "a choice", cause that's rarely the typical narrative. For me though, childhood and disposition left me pretty...ambivalent gender-wise? I don't think I even had a firm grasp that there were strong dividing lines between guys and girls, masculine and feminine, until puberty or thereabouts. So the idea of arbitrary path-dependence horrified me when it sure looked like that path sucked a lot. Of course people are going to fail at gender roles if you assign ones that don't fit to begin with. (This is the only redeeming part of the "toxic masculinity" discourse, that the default Male roles available for lotsa people are fairly constraining, compared to what's on offer for Female.)
(Phyrexia is awful and I hate it and it can die in a fire. Rip Nahiri :( The only good thing to ever come out of Mirrodin is Equipment as a card type...but goddamn those mythic rare haymaker swords are dumb too. Like the new R/G protection one...throw that on Moraug? Main, land drop, additional combat, combat, post-main, additional land drop, additional combat.... Add in double strike, Scaretiller, and Tiller Engine for shits and giggles. Or additional-combat additional-main cards, how about Aggravated Assault? So dumb.)
I really appreciate the response! Transsexuality is just an intellectual curiosity for me, I don't really have any "skin in the game" as I am content with my gender role and don't know any lgbtq people irl anyway, as such I have to thank you for honoring my heartless investigations. Interestingly just yesterday, when I went boozing for titanic amounts, I heard about another ftm transgender in my far expanded acquintance circle, although in that case the prior girl already showed masculine behaviour before transition, he wanted to pick fights and get into physical brawls even before taking testosterone lol.
For a while I thought that transsexuality was accidentally solved through Jungian psychoanalysis, more specifically the concept of the shadow, even more specifically the concept of the animus for women or the anima for men. Basically people who can't accept the element of their soul that is of the mirrored gender get overcome by it, just as not accepting your shadow has you always becoming subservient to it. By now I have distanced myself a bit from that, especially since I am not really sure where I stand in the Jung vs Freud/Lacan split of psychoanalysis.
Contact with IPT through "whatever the hell the military is doing to get its recruits to be less fat" however has put me hot on the trail of "interpersonal role transition". The rise of transsexuality across the world could be a sign of traditional gender roles failing (leaving the discussion of wether that is by principle and spectrum based gender roles are more advanced/superior or wether that is because of terrible execution of traditional gender roles in postmodern societes aside) and people manually choosing a role transition if they can't find a satisfying subrole in the limits of their assigned gender role.
Both female and male gender roles seem corrupt to me at the time, with feminity having to suffer with some really weird stuff from 3rd and 4th wave feminism (I am strongly opposed to intersectionality), and traditional masculinity is literally getting pathologised with intentions to add toxic masculinity to certain mental illness catalogues (trashdaddy Zizek on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKGa6g8Kk5g)
I kinda believe in a weird Nietzschean sense of Will to Power (although even Nietzsche did not know what that means as he never finished his book on that), in that most people don't really have a lot of control over the things that are happening in their lifes, and having control over such choices due to hightened consciousness is generally unusual. As such for me the question would be less "Is there a choice between becoming trans or not in general?" and more "Is it a choice for each individual?". Basically how high your individual will to change yourself is decides wether it is a manual choice to change or wether you are changed by your environment.
(Fuck Nahiri, I am a simp for Sorin Markov and his daughterfu Avacyn. I am generally ambivalent to Phyrexians, but I love that they are killing Gatewatch members indiscriminately, including the compleation of Jace and his gf Vraska. I am really tired of the Marvel-style Gatewatch storytelling that dominated MTG recently. Will probably not stay that way for long, but at least it is a chance for stakes to appear. Gameplay wise I just want any monoG strategy to be viable in standard again, Teething Wurmlet artifact etb is kinda shit although very fun. Thinkin' about Teething Wurmlet into Skrel Hive in Selesnya)
From personal experience, highly-engaged in-person communities with similar political views to those isolated online cliques have even higher rates of gender changes than the similar online communities. (Specifically, an especially far-left college and its surroundings.) Screen time is definitely not a factor; being integrated into a community that is pro-X will, obviously, result in more X, and equally obviously people who are isolated want community more thaneothers.
From personal experience, highly-engaged in-person communities with similar political views to those isolated online cliques have even higher rates of gender changes than the similar online communities. (Specifically, an especially far-left college and its surroundings.) Screen time is definitely not a factor; being integrated into a community that is pro-X will, obviously, result in more X, and equally obviously people who are isolated want community more thaneothers.
I'd say that social media is more responsible than schools, although peer groups at school influenced by social media are an indirect cause. A lot of amateur gender therapists on social media think every teen with questions about their gender is trans and every trans person needs HRT yesterday.
Yeah in my experience with two teenage daughters it is much less the schools themselves than the peers and the peers are largely driven by social media.
If you want to tilt the odds in your favor keeping the kids off of phones/social media and sending them to a parochial school probably is your best bet.
CW, nitpick: imo “in your favor” is a potentially counter productive framing because of its judgmental connotation. Kids resent parental judgment. Parents can suppress them for a while but sooner or later the cat’s out of the bag anyway.
The thing that is most clear from your comment is that you don't have kids. When/if you do have kids, you are going to be super disappointed about how much control you have over things like their gender expression and other life choices.
"Well gosh, I just couldn't teach my kid not to be a rapist/serial killer/racist, there is no way parents can control life choices!"
These kinds of arguments are not accepted when it's policies the progressive side want to push - of course you can teach your kid not to partake in rape culture. Of course you can raise an anti-racist baby. Of course you can influence your children not to pollute and to be environmentally aware.
No, you can't control children as if they are robots, they have their own minds and personalities. But we do expect to be able to teach them values. And until they're old enough to leave the house and live on their own, yes parents definitely can have control over "gender expression", or whatever fashionable new term is in vogue next week.
You can engage in all the ridiculous reductio arguments you want, but the fact remains that, yes, parents obviously have *some* influence on their kids and also that that influence is both weaker and less direct than just about any parent would like. To take your example, I don't think that there are many parents raising their kids to be serial killers, and yet serial killers exist. I don't think there are many parents raising their kids to be trans or gay for that matter, and yet all of these types of people exist.
I can't even get my kid to stop doing self-defeating things that are explicitly in her self interest not to do, much less dump a set of my preferred values into her. Of course, she is acculturating to my upper middle class values simply by virtue of marinating in this environment, but there's not much I can do to deviate from this even with respect to aspects of the environment that I find distasteful.
You can easily hide behind vague generalities like "we expect to be able to teach kids values" (of course), so I want to be explicit here: no, I don't think parents have much control over "gender expression," and attempts to assert such control are likely to have unanticipated consequences, not least because they almost certainly come bundled with a bunch of other parental hang-ups that will be screamingly obvious to the kid.
"Gender expression" is a weasel term. What does it mean? Boys dressing up in skirts and eyeliner? That's been around for a long time.
Boys who think they're girls and girls who think they're boys?
Women wearing trousers? That's no longer a sign of "dressing like a man", but acceptable for everyone.
Be more clear as to what you mean. If you mean "Billy thinks he's a girl" then say that. Teenagers have been "expressing" themselves with clothing, hair colour and the rest of it.
If you mean "expressing my gender in a different way to the norms around expressing my gender" then parents will and do try to stop their kids doing dumb shit like tattoos and piercings. Maybe modern parents are more chill with it - or maybe not. I think it's still an indication of lower socio-economic class.
Yes when Billy and Susie go off to college, she can put a ring in her nose like she's cattle and he can wear makeup. Then they grow the fuck up and put away childish things.
And any parent who stands by and shrugs and goes "Nothing I can do" when their child is making foolish decisions, is considered neglectful. Are you *trying* to get your child to stop doing self-defeating things, or are you just shrugging and going "nature over-rides nurture"?
I imagine you are trying to influence away from damaging behaviour, even with all your words around "it's innate, parenting won't do much". And if your child was going out and hurting others or causing damage, damn sure you'd step in to put a stop to that, never mind any "parents don't have much control over their kids' life choices".
When they live as independent adults, they can make all the life choices they want, even if that means bad ones. But what parent will at least not try to stop their child making bad choices?
And *that's* where the disagreement lies. Belt of Truth says it's only "reactionaries" who care about "their sons cutting their dicks off". If someone thinks "cutting your dick off is a fine lifestyle choice, Billy" then of course they are going to object to the idea that a parent can - or should - have any control over this kind of lifestyle choice. Billy is really Susie, nothing I can do about that and I shouldn't even try.
But if it's innate for Billy to be Susie, it's just as innate for Billy to like torturing animals or fantasise about murdering the kids in his class. Yet nobody thinks that "oh no, you shouldn't even try to interfere with Billy's expression or his life choices" there.
No, I'm not going to be more clear about what I mean, because it's perfectly obvious. I'll just repeat myself: parents have indirect and limited control over their kids, whose values are mostly determined by the cultural milieu in which they are raised, of which parents are one small part.
The most obvious example of this is immigrant parents. If you are, say, from China and your kids are born in America and go to school in America, your kids will be American. They will be a little bit Chinese, but they aren't in any way shape or form going to fit in with a bunch of Chinese school kids in China. And if you go to heroic efforts to raise them Chinese in America, the most likely outcome is that they will find you annoying, overbearing, and out of touch. They will do what they need to to humor you and make the peace. You will have some influence over your kid, just not a ton.
I'm pretty sure there is no area more so than childrearing that people like to project their ideological biases, fantasies, and delusions onto. So, you know, join the club. In answer to your question about whether I try to get my child to stop doing self-defeating things: I spend endless amounts of time and energy trying to get her to stop doing self-defeating things. These efforts just don't work very well, because I am battling her personality.
I can certainly ban certain behaviors, and that may work for a while. I can tell my kid that she can't get a tattoo while I'm supporting her, and most likely she will obey me. But I'm not under any illusion that I'm winning this argument in the long term if she has different ideas. (This is hypothetical. My kid is eight and deathly afraid of needles.)
If you want to pour your energy into convincing your child that dressing a certain way violates the natural order, have at it. Most likely they were going to conform to gender norms anyway, since that's what most people do. And if they weren't going to, you might be able to shame them out of it. But if you think your kid isn't going to pick up on the emotional energy driving your weird culture war obsessions, well, good luck to you. Most likely they won't share that energy, and they will just do what they need to do to humor you.
"parents have indirect and limited control over their kids, whose values are mostly determined by the cultural milieu in which they are raised, of which parents are one small part."
And you'll surely notice that many people talking about this here have been mentioning their ability (as parents) to control the social/cultural environment in which their kids are raised.
Thus the mentions of various school types and keeping them off social media and the like.
"If you are, say, from China and your kids are born in America and go to school in America, your kids will be American. They will be a little bit Chinese, but they aren't in any way shape or form going to fit in with a bunch of Chinese school kids in China."
This is something I have experience with, so I'd say that your take should be nuanced a bit. The parents can certainly increase the odds of the kid fitting in with Chinese school kids in China. Most obviously, they can move to China. If they stay in America, they can find a school where most of the students are first-generation Chinese, so that most of the kid's friends will probably be Chinese. If they can't do that, they can at least teach the kid the Chinese language and the basics of Chinese culture. The cultural milieu in which the kids are raised can be changed by the parents.
Can you raise a child to not be autistic? Some mental traits aren't so simple to change.
You can control if a child *expresses* their gender identity, in a "you're not allowed to wear skirts" sense, but I'm not aware of any therapy or parenting strategy that can make a trans person not *want* to be a particular gender. And the brute force "no, you're not allowed to identify as a woman in my house" is unlikely to be good for your relationship with them.
One confounder I'll note among the trans, mid-20's people I've known: a disproportionate share seem to come from environments with very strong, fairly essentialist views on gender roles--so "I like cooking and sewing, and hate open aggression" translates to "I must be a girl" more than in some other environments.
I think there is a lot to this and more generally to the notion that a lot of the "gender dysphoria" among kids has less to do with biological gender than with gender roles. It is worth noting that it's surprisingly common in lots of traditional societies with strong gender norms for there to be an accepted "third gender" in which someone switches roles. And also that terms like gay and transgender don't map cleanly to this social arrangement. E.g.:
Meh I am a bit skeptical of this kind of claim. A lot of the examples I have been provided in the past are post hoc modern creations presented as traditional practices when you dive deep into them. Or are jsut twisting words around to mean other things.
I mean in 19th century England you could call someone a "fop" or "dandy", that didn't mean there were "three accepted genders". Some of the analysis really reeks of that kid of stretching. Always be skeptical of new anthropological claims that match modern political needs.
I think you are really wrong about this, but I don't have deep anthropological expertise here. For what it's worth, the phenomenon in the article I link to is 1) absolutely real -- I have been to Samoa and it is a widely known and generally accepted aspect of many Polynesian cultures; 2) long, long predates current arguments about contemporary gender norms; and 3) definitely exists elsewhere. For example, there is analogous situation in the Balkans dating back to the 1500s.
This has nothing to do with "fops" or "dandies." It is a practice in which in which members of one gender choose to live as the other gender in all manners of dress, social custom, and even pronouns. Often this is legally recognized and certainly it is culturally recognized, often even in societies where homosexuality is taboo. Be as skeptical as you want, but this stuff happens.
>I mean in 19th century England you could call someone a "fop" or "dandy", that didn't mean there were "three accepted genders".
So, to be clear, your evidence that a gender-non-conforming "third gender" doesn't historically exist is that you can immediately point to examples of widely accepted categories of gnc individuals in western history?
Right, but that's just a cultural quirk of description, not a categorical one. You could just as easily say the same about e.g. ASD individuals, or people with schizophrenia, but just because we didn't have the same language or categories to talk about them doesn't mean they didn't exist.
This is more or less my take. We’re not used to living in a world where men and women are all allowed, much less encouraged, to do each other’s traditional “stuff”. The stronger the messaging about “boy things” and “girl things”, the harder it might be to feel good about thinking/feeling/liking certain stuff without feeling disqualified from one gender or another.
I didn’t grow up with terribly strict rules here despite coming from a relatively socially conservative home. I think this is why I find it much easier to grasp being trans than non-binary. I just can’t imagine a thought that would disqualify me from simply being a woman, or qualify any aspect of myself as male. In my head, “woman” is an incredibly stretchy category, and nothing short of actually wanting to completely be a man could evict even a little bit me from that. The challenge non-binary people pose to me is that in validating their identities, which proceed from different first principles, I’m implicitly accepting that there are thoughts and ideas that are “male” and *should* push me out of my own binary. And I balk at that, because to me the whole idea of egalitarianism was that the ideas and thoughts lose their binary connotations and became available to me in my identity as a woman.
I haven’t resolved this. I really liked having biology as the be-all-end-all of gender, because it seemed so much better than classing objects, thoughts and feelings by gender. But I want to be hospitable to trans people, so I’m cool with having other signals be strictly gendered. I need them myself to inhabit my own identity to my satisfaction. An inscrutable identity is no identity at all for most of us.
I think what we have today is the product of rising egalitarianism, so not a bad thing. But weird side effect of things not being so strictly gendered is that it becomes harder to feel comfortable as one gender or another, and that’s enough to tip people with certain mental presets and environmental influences over some line. The downside is that we’ve all lost some powerful tools to inhabit our identities, innate and/or created. I think gender roles are really necessary to self-actualize, and as much as we try to break them down they’re constantly re-forming. My best guess is that some set of external signals will coalesce around the idea of being non-binary, it will become legible and boring and the numbers will level out. Learning about all this in school will probably just accelerate that process.
Anecdata, but my experience of this is exactly opposite. In my social circle, it's the more progressive families that have higher trans rates (teens rather than mid-20s, if anyone thinks that makes a difference).
Socially progressive and essentialist gender ideas are in practice not a contradiction imo. Sure, we don't ussualy associate these two together. And when asked directly, someone who identifies as progressive will say that eg girls can be tough too and boys can be caring and men can clean and women can cook.
However, what is the actual behavior in those circles? Who works more, who takes care of children more, what clothes are worn by who, who wears make-up, who are football fans.
Anecdata: 2 young adults from progressive circles with understanding parents, accepted by their social circle. Reasons they identify as trans: 1. feeling like they don't fit in with the boys, having a soft personality, has hobbies they think are female, likes to wear skirts. And 2. not liking girly stuff, hates make-up and dresses, feels uncomfortable compared to other women, has hobbies they think are manly.
So how come the rate of transgenderism is much higher now, where essentialist views on gender are uncommon, than they were in the past, when they were universal?
You are reading too much causality into correlation - this is observational, not prospective. People are forgetting that children aren't randomly assigned schooling methods. The children who end up in different schooling environments certainly differ significantly from each other.
Specifically relevant for our example, is that a significant percentage of homeschooled students (I don't know whether that is ~10% or ~90% or somewhere in between) are home-schooling because brick and mortar schools did not work out or were obviously non-viable.
Oftentimes, this is due to the children having social issues and not fitting in. Remember, autistic people are much likelier to experience gender dysphoria than non-autistic people.
So it is not shocking that homeschooled people would have a high frequency of trans identity.
It still seems likely enough that putting them in a public school would only make it worse.
Additionally, the survey results are from 3 years ago, and more significantly, describe the results of readers largely decades past their years of public schooling or alternatives.
Seeing a lack of positive correlation between those who attended public schools in the 80s and 90s and those who identity as trans, is *not* a reason to assume to that the lack of positive correlation would remain between those in public schools in this decade and trans identity some decades later.
FWIW, we were part of a few homeschooling groups in two states as our son was growing up and there was always a significant minority of homeschoolers who have ASD and the parents are homeschooling because there were adequate family resources to pull that off and it seemed easier to them than navigating all the services necessary for their children to make schooling workable.
My impression is that homeschoolers break down into:
* majority are doing for religious reasons (as many as 80% I think?)
* secular homeschooling because kids are off of one bell curve or another (includes kids with ASD)
* homeschooling for ideological reasons
* homeschooling for parent/child-rearing philosophy reasons
* homeschooling for life circumstance reasons (traveling careers, etc)
My unscientific impression is that of the minority of secular homeschoolers, the ones homeschooling because kids are off a bell curve in some way is as large as the three categories that come after. I say this in support of the idea that the percentage of transgender homeschoolers may be influenced by the percentage of transgender people with ASD.
Based on what I know of the homeschooling community -- more than most, but not a member of that community -- it is possible that the higher likelihood of a homeschool kid being trans may be that the kid was homeschooled because he/she did not fit in at school. So the parents pull the kid out to homeschool because regular school was not going well because the kid didn't fit in. Then some of those kids who didn't fit in, it turns out, did not fit in because they were trans.
"Hmmmm if I were to homeschool my future kids, one of the primary motivations would be so they wouldn't be brainwashed into being trans... But this shows that that homeschooled kids are the most likely to go trans"
As a general rule, I am cautious about using homeschooling AVERAGES when trying to draw conclusions about homeschooling for specific situations.
Two anecdotes to illustrate:
*) A homeschooling colleague (former Stanford STEM prof, at the time working for a biotech startup) from a few decades back uses a three-bin clustering to describe homeschoolers:
a) The stereotypically religious who read the Bible every day
b) Sandal wearing granola parents who read John Holt
c) Those who are focused on academics and find schools such as Palo Alto High School unacceptable
[NOTE: His gross stereotyping for effect :-)]
One *can* average everyone in all three bins together as "homeschoolers" but if someone plans to homeschool they probably know which bin they fit into. The other bins might not be relevant for prediction purposes.
*) A YMCA swim instructor from 20 years back (who was one of the best people I have ever seen with children) noted that the kids she saw binned out as:
a) Public school: More resilient then the public school kids if not as 'high powered' (e.g. smaller vocabularies for age). Handled setback well.
b) Private school: Less resilient, more high powered, less self-directed
c) Homeschoolers: Completely all over the map and totally unpredictable.
The key point here is (c) ... again, one could generate an average, but it might not be very useful if the spread is wide and the spread is not randomly distributed for any specific situation.
Homeschooling means that more of your peer group is family, siblings and perhaps children of your parents' friends, less random age peers. So whether that means more woke, pro trans, or whatever or less depends on the composition of those peer groups.
I agree, with the caveat that some less structured or less supervised homeschooled kids may be more online than school kids and that may increase the influence of social media.
At a slight tangent, I wonder to what extent social media interactions end up age segregated. That's one of the things I don't like about the conventional model of schooling. When I was fourteen I should have been arguing with adults and socializing with kids my age or younger.
Our home unschooled daughter did her online socializing largely on World of Warcraft, which I would expect to result in a not very age segregated pattern — her mother and I were on too. SSC, ACX and DSL all have a wide mix of ages. I don't know to what extent that's true of social interactions on FB or Discord or ... .
There's nothing inherent to the task of homeschooling a child that makes them more likely to be trans. I think your fear is misplaced. Scott warned about the low sample size for this question, the percentages are so close it's hard to argue these findings are significant, no?
eh, purely speculation, but IMO your choice of co-parent, and your relationship with your future kids will have a lot more to do with that, than what form of education you choose.
I wouldn't generalize this survey result that much given the vagueness of the term "have changed their gender", which is not the same as attempting to change their sex. This likely includes things like people who identify as "genderfluid" because it sounds cool but don't actually behave any differently from anyone else.
It's still weird that homeschools and public schools have equal amounts of both, but it's hard to tell what the mix is from this data alone, and I still anticipate public schools having higher rates of kids actually attempting to medically transition.
Parents who choose different approaches to schooling are different, and their children thus differ, wherever you stand on the nature/nurture thing. Children also often have input, and children who push in different directions are different.
This is beyond confounded, and can't be fixed by tossing a couple of variables in the magic unconfounding jar.
Apologies if this comes across as rude, but this is the kind of social science statistical analysis that really winds me up.
Scott has definitely shown merely correlations, and these don't necessarily imply causations. However, it is even less likely that something causes the opposite of what it's correlated with, or that it is a strong cause for something it's not correlated with, so there is still useful data to update your priors on here (though more in the direction of 'X probably doesn't cause Y, or at least don't cause it much' than 'X definitely causes Z').
Actually, things very often cause things they're uncorrelated or anticorrelated with. For example, consider someone driving on a hilly highway while intentionally keeping their speed constant. Their speed will not be very correlated with the amount of fuel usage or whether they're going up or down hill. However, both of those factors have a strong causal effect on speed.
For another example, consumption of full fat dairy products is correlated with lower childhood obesity compared to low fat dairy products. However, it could be that parents with obese children choose to give them lower fat dairy products because they think it will help - and the parents could be right! Maybe it helps, but doesn't fully return the child's weight to baseline. (I don't know whether full fat dairy causes obesity. My point is simply that the correlation doesn't tell us much.)
> However, it is even less likely that something causes the opposite of what it's correlated with, or that it is a strong cause for something it's not correlated with
Yeah, kind of like how the correlation between ibuprofen use and headaches makes it very unlikely ibuprofen could cause the opposite.
Good point! The relevant link there though is that headaches cause ibuprofen. The correlation is because of a causation, but you have to consider the temporal relationship to work out which way round the causation runs. So long as we're confident that the survey respondents feelings about school came after they went to school, then we can rule out this confounder.
OP was talking about the parents, which come (temporally) before the education. The hypothesis is that the parents cause the style of education, and they also (through nature or nurture, take your pick) cause certain values/beliefs in their kids. These values/beliefs will inform how people answer questions such as ”did you hate high school?” Hence the education style will correlate with the responses, but there is no causal link. Both are a function of mom and dad. This cannot be ruled out without control, and it’s hard to see how one could control for it.
So, you're suggesting that eg. the kind of kid most likely to enjoy home-schooling is one whose parents are most likely to try home-schooling? That's still very useful information, even if it doesn't generalise to most children and parents!
At least for 2022 sample (but they purposely make it pretty stable over time), 750 Verbal was 98th percentile, while 740 Math was 94th percentile. The scores for each section range from 200-800.
> So, most students take the SAT, why is this? I thought SAT was specifically related to / used for college admission?
It's given to high school students, who are usually encouraged to at least consider college as an option. People who score highly can be offered scholarships which may enable them to pursue options they might not otherwise be able to afford.
Note that a total score of 1300 was 96.55 percentile in 1984.
This survey data is from 2020, so a survey taker who was about 43 would likely have taken the harder test. I think the ages in the survey are rounded to the nearest decade. About 13% of respondents are 50 older, so approximately that many took the harder test.
The test has changed a number other times as well, not just 1994. 2016 may have been the next largest change. While both changes have been characterized by some as making the test easier, the changes were orthogonal to just turning the difficulty knob and any changes to score distribution are secondary effects.
Thanks for correcting me. I now see that the scores were renormed in 1995, after the changes introduced in 1994. I guess this is why scores before the mid-90s look so different, instead of the test getting "easier."
Verbal scores were boosted maybe 70 points from 1994 to 1995, but Math scores only about 10 points.
The pre-1995 Verbal SAT test was hard. In 1991, only nine boys (and no girls) got perfect 800s on both math and verbal, although 800 on the math was not uncommon among, say, Rice U. students.
Henry Harpending called the old SAT Verbal. the best high-end IQ test in the world.
As a voucher enthusiast I am surprised that private and home schools don’t have more of a lead over public schools in terms of satisfaction. Maybe it’s because of the high achieving selection of ACX readers? Kids who are smart are more supported by teachers and administrators?
There's a wide range in quality of public education in this country. Many ACX readers probably grew up with upper-middle-class suburbs with high-quality public schools. Vouchers make most sense in poorer, especially urban districts with lower-quality schools.
Hm. Maybe it's different in a bigger city; but growing up, there were three or four main public high-schools, and all of them were equally awful — the well-off universally sent their kids to one of the three spendy private high-schools. (Being Texas, all three were varying degrees of religious too — although, honestly, I'm sort of glad about that; Biblical knowledge has actually sort of come in handy, and it certainly helped develop my skepticism, heh.)
I would guess this varies by region. In the Bay Area, for example, Cupertino is known for having really good public schools, and affluent parents will live in Cupertino so they can send their kids to the public schools there.
There's a cycle of good schools -> increased local housing demand from affluent parents -> increased housing prices -> less affluent families priced out; most schoolchildren are from affluent houses -> even better schools.
To elaborate on your point of ACX readers being high achieving, the relationship between alternative schooling methods and satisfaction could be like the relationship between height and basketball prowess.
Height may be positively correlated to basketball prowess, but among those extremely talented at basketball (the NBA), one may not find that taller players have more prowess. However, being tall makes it much likelier that someone will be in the group of highly talented players in the first place.
Similarly, being homeschooled could make it much likelier that one will be successful, but after conditioning the sample based on that feature, we may no longer see the association.
However, if this were correct, we would expect that the percentage of ACX readers who be disproportionately home-schooled and private schooled compared to the general population, just as we find that NBA players are much taller than the general population.
I don't know if this is the case, as I don't know the age distribution in the sample, and the rate of schooling by type at the time that they were being educated.
The home/public difference seems very impressive to me. I wouldn't expect too much private/public difference, most private schools seem like the same model as public schools, only ritzier.
Fair enough, but I have now been convinced voucher type private schooling won’t increase education scores vs public (contrary to my priors) and now we have the possibility that they won’t increase satisfaction much either. But I guess the case is still there of parental choice, possibly cost and the argument that if a voucher system isn’t any worse than a public system, a voucher system should be the default not the public one because freedom.
On what basis would you think that vouchers wouldn't increase education scores? If it is on the basis of the comparison of SAT scores of public schools and private schools in this sample, note that private school outperformed public by 15 points in the verbal section, and outperformed them in math by 14 points.
As for an actual study of vouchers, Thomas Sowell looked at the performance of pupils in charter schools that shared buildings with non-charter public schools, and drew from the same population, but granted slots based on lottery.
Lastly, and this is most relevant for Scott's point about private / public, I suspect that the marginal benefit of private schools (or other non-homeschool options, like public charter schools) vs. public schools would be larger among worse schools than better schools.
This extreme failure seems very easy for an alternative school to improve - any students testing proficient would be an infinite improvement!
In a high performing public school, however, there is less room for possible improvement.
The sorts of disadvantaged students who would benefit the most from alternatives to traditional schools (e.g. by learning something, instead of nothing), would hardly be represented in this sample regardless of whether they got the better option, so we would not expect to see large performance benefits to the homeschooled cohort.
The key quote was “the best-identified studies suggest that winning a voucher has an effect on achievement that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. “
As they say a lot of studies are difficult to interpret due to selection effects. In fact I think Scott has coined the phrase “if an analysis of an education intervention shows benefits and if it can be due to selection it is due to selection “. Maybe the studies you quoted refute this, I certainly hope so.
As I said I remain a voucher supporter for other reasons.
The main advantage of the private religious schools I attended was that the school could "un-invite" kids who made a nuisance of themselves. What remained were the reasonably well-behaved students who, even if they weren't great academic performers, weren't going to prevent anyone else from learning.
Since the survey has a question related to childhood class, you could check. Here's the percentage of respondents rating 3 or less to school satisfaction who also answered both the "childhood class" and "school type" questions:
Rich kids in private schools -> 7.4%
Rich kids in public schools -> 16.5%
Upper Middle Class in private schools -> 14.4%
Upper Middle Class in public schools -> 21.2%
Middle Class in private schools -> 14.1%
Middle Class in public schools -> 23.0%
Working-lower Class in private schools -> 25%
Working-lower Class in public schools -> 32.6%
Poor in private schools -> 41.7%
Poor in public schools -> 43.2%
No, I don't think it's history class. I'd guess it's private schools' ability to reject the most disruptive students. The "poor" results weaken that interpretation, but there are other reasons why being poor in a private school might be unpleasant.
Maybe because private schools are better at differentiating lessons for gifted students? Whereas the public schools force gifted students to complete tediously easy worksheets and won’t let them bring their own books into class and never give them the opportunity to learn anything new.
Maybe it's just my demographic, but the narrative I always heard about public schools is that they support middling students the most, especially when standardized tests are involved. The reason being that students at the top are going to pass anyway and students at the bottom are going to fail no matter what. I no longer feel quite as sure that this is true looking back compared to how I felt about it when I was actually in school though.
When I was in school (80s/90s), there were definitely a lot of programs to provide extra resources for gifted students; now that my kids are in school (middle & high), things are much more lockstep and deviations are only available for the left side of the distribution.
I understand that there is a general skepticism about p value and statistical hypothesis testing, but without even a standard deviation those values are pretty much useless.
Yeah, Scott really should have reported confidence intervals for those measurements. Maybe he should partner with someone who's better at statistics? That would also let him do that regression he wanted to do.
Yes, that's why I suggested to report the std instead of doing statistical testing. This would give at least a small indication of the overlapping of the distributions, and will tell you a lot about how to change your beliefs. E.g. let's say we have something like
Rate of life satisfaction
Government school: 5.63 with a std of ~3
Religious school: 5.87 with a std of ~3
It's an minuscule difference which I won't give much weight to, compared to having the same results with a std of let's say 0.1.
I believe this method to be better than the confidence interval which as you suggested would result in very high confidence due to the massive amount of respondants. But do we really care about the REAL population mean? Or do we care more about the spread of the responses? I would argue for the latter. (Sorry for overexplaining)
Thanks! In fact, I guess most people would want to answer questions such as "how likely is that my child will be better off doing homeschooling than public school?" - then we don't care whether on average, amongst 8000 people, we can spot a small difference. We care about the distributions. So since the spread is pretty high I would say that deciding between one will, in most cases, not matter at all.
There are still an awful lot of families for whom the stats don't matter, because it's more about what they realistically have access to.
We homeschool because we can't afford private, and the local public schools are crap. None of these stats would change our income, or the performance of our local schools.
Thanks for raising this. This was my gut reaction when reading the numbers but I didn't know what to ask for. The SDs here I read as indicating that none of these results are significant. Is that how you also read it?
The long thread above about fear of homeschooling being a contributor to transgenderism seemed a very big thing to load onto a smaller sample size with small differences. But the correlations relating to other variables drawn from the whole sample also seem insignificant.
No, this is not the correct interpretation. The results are significant which means that there is an aggregated difference amongst the groups. It also means that if you repeat the survey again you will get a fairly similar mean.
The problem with the means is that it doesn't give you a strong idea about how variable those results are from an individual to another. Eg if your child goes to private school there is a 0.01% (made up number) chance they will do better in life than if they go to a public school.
This would be significant, but is it a number we should care about? Whatever is your answer, sometime this is the question we wanna answer, not the presence of some aggregated difference. Notice the mean alone won't allow you to get this info.
The number above can be computed exactly with a few assumptions, with the mean and std provided above by Scott. But it's late now in Italy, maybe tomorrow!
Is this a raw standard deviation or a standard error of the mean? Can you also post the sample sizes for each group?
If this is indeed an SEM, it changes the interpretation of the article to be basically a null result. I don't know that reporting the means or inviting people to opine on them is justified by the data.
Agreed, this is pretty mileading. 6.72 vs 6.56 is way less than. A standard error, and not even close to being statistically significant. Scott should have just posted "there were no significant differences on all these measures."
Here is the probability that an individual from each group will have a better outcome (e.g. LIFE/SOCIAL SATISFACTION) than an individual from Public school. Remember that the baseline is 50%, which indicates that there is a 50/50 chance that the individual will do better/worse in, for example, "religious" school than public school, and this happens if the means and stds from the 2 groups are the same:
APPROVAL RATING
home: 74.051%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 54.371%
private: 64.640%
unschooling: 56.494%
LIFE SATISFACTION
home: 53.040%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 51.747%
private: 51.165%
unschooling: 40.303%
SOCIAL SATISFACTION
home: 53.723%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 53.600%
private: 55.109%
unschooling: 48.164%
Another way of looking at this: subtract 50% from each value, and now they indicate the increase in likelihood that an individual from a school is gonna do "better" than an individual from public school.
Example: if you put your child to a private school, there is 5.1% increase in chance that they will have a higher SOCIAL SATISFACTION than a person from a public school.
Gender non-conformity is quite strongly associated with poverty, so it is not a good measure of weirdness when your categories are correlated with poverty. Specifically, higher rate of gender non-conformity in home schooled population may be partially statistically explained by the higher rate of poverty.
"Specifically, higher rate of gender non-conformity in home schooled population may be partially statistically explained by the higher rate of poverty."
Are the home schooled more likely to be living in poverty as children? My impression was that since parents had to be responsible for their children's education and would be assessed to make sure the kids were reaching standards, that it would be better-off parents doing this - one parent at least who can be full-time at-home with the kids and able to get textbooks and do the kind of "now kids let's learn about X" experiments and field trips and visits to museums and art galleries and so on.
Though if kids are being 'home schooled' because they dropped out of school and there are other circumstances where they're living in broken homes, that would correlate with poverty.
Looking up the demographics, there are some fascinating results:
"Analysis: The NHES 2012 and NHES 2016 found sharp increases in the rate of homeschooling among Hispanic students. According to NHES estimates, the number of Hispanic children being homeschooled rose from just over 250,000 to just under 450,000 between 2012 and 2016.
Analysis: Between the NHES 1999 and the NHES 2016, the percentage of students being homeschooled by parents without a high school diploma or GED rose while the number of students being homeschooled by parents with a graduate or professional degree fell. The rise in the number of students being homeschooled by parents who have not completed high school or a GED is consistent across the NHES 2012 and NHES 2016; in 2012, 11% of homeschooled students fell into this category; in 2016, 15% did.
Analysis: The NHES 2003 found that homeschooled students were as likely as other students to be poor and more likely to be near-poor. After 2003, the NHES stopped reporting the percentage of students who were near-poor, so it is impossible to know whether this finding holds true today. The elevated rate of near-poverty among homeschooled students may have been the result of some homeschooling families’ giving up a second income.
Analysis: In contrast to previous surveys, which have typically found roughly the same level of poverty among homeschooling families as among other families, the NHES 2016 found that homeschooled students were more likely than other students to live below the poverty level. This change is likely related to shifts in racial demographics and levels of parental education also evident in the 2016 survey.
Analysis: The NHES 2012 found that homeschooled children were more likely than other children to live in households with two parents (biological, adoptive, step, or foster). Roughly one in five homeschooled children lived in a household with one parent (compared with nearly a third of students overall).
Analysis: The NHES 2012 found that homeschooled children were more likely than other students to have two parents with one in the labor force. While the survey found that over a third of homeschooled children have two parents in the labor force, what this looks like in practice is unclear; in some cases a homeschooling parent may stay home to educate their children while taking on flexible work on the side. "
So very roughly - homeschooling is mostly white kids, though with increasing numbers of Hispanic kids. Parents are less educated and less well off *but* households are more stable, with two-parent families and at least one parent working.
Are these parents who don't trust what is happening in public schools with regard to education, or think public schools are too dangerous? Why pull the kids out of public school to homeschool them?
Some states don't require assessment of the students.
Also, two parents with one in the workforce is the classical setup for homeschooling as the non-working parent has to provide daycare since schools aren't utilized. This means generally you get one parent with a higher than average income but an aggregate household income that can be lower. I knew very few families that were exceptions to this.
This causes some weird things with class, where the profession and culture of the family is higher than the income would suggest.
Yes, this. I could nearly double our household income by going back to work instead of homeschooling our kids. We're kind of poor, on paper. That's voluntary.
I do notice that in Scott's stats, the rate of homeschooling goes down as income goes up-- I'm curious if that's true of the population at large, or if the SSC readership is too much of an outlier to draw conclusions from.
Yeah I was really surprised recently when a Hispanic woman with just a HS degree who was working for me on a project and whose husband always worked away from the home said she was homeschooling her youngest kid. She put in a lot of hours on the project each day (and was good), and I was wondering when the "schooling" was happening.
"My impression was that since parents had to be responsible for their children's education and would be assessed to make sure the kids were reaching standards"
Not true in California, where we home unschooled our kids.
We're in that demographic-- near-poor, two parents, one working, homeschooling the kids.
Why? Because even if we were both working, we couldn't afford to live in a good school district, or pay tuition. The local schools here are crap. The best we can do for our kids is teach them ourselves, and for that, it's worth living on one modest income.
I think home schooled children in US come from slightly poorer but more educated families on average https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/homeschool-demographics/ , at least more recently and this is also seen from the ACX survey. Which makes sense to me, as one of the logical pathways to home schooling is to have educated parents who cannot afford to live near a good school.
I think that this isn't the right way of looking at those numbers. As someone else pointed out: only 1 in 3 households with children have a stay-at-home parent, whereas a stay-at-home parent is basically the default for homeschool families. Intuitions about a two-parent-two-income family that earns $125k compared to a two-parent-two-income family that earns $65k aren't the same for a two-parent-one-income family that earns $65k.
One of the logical pathways is to have educated parents who cannot afford to live near a good school. Another way is to have well-paid parents who can afford to have one not work.
I see a lot of reports that there are high rates of poverty among transgender adults. It wasn't clear to me that that meant they were also raised in poverty. And nothing I saw pertained to gender non-conformity in childhood.
"13.6% of foster youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning, 13.2 % reported some level of same-sex attraction, and 5.6% identify as transgender. This means that there are between 1.5 to 2 times as many LGBTQ youth living in foster care as LGBTQ youth estimated to be living outside of foster care"
Presumably being in foster care means coming from homes and families with problems, and more likely to be living in poverty. For the gender non-conforming, they have a figure of 11.1% along with the above 5.6% transgender figure.
For general rate of transgenderism in adults and youth:
"In this study, we use data from the 2017 and 2019 YRBS and the 2017- 2020 BRFSS to find that:
Over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older.
Among U.S. adults, 0.5% (about 1.3 million adults) identify as transgender. Among youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S., 1.4% (about 300,000 youth) identify as transgender.
Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.
Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. We find that youth ages 13 to 17 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).
The racial/ethnic distribution of youth and adults who identify as transgender appears generally similar to the U.S. population, though our estimates mirror prior research that found transgender youth and adults are more likely to report being Latinx and less likely to report being White compared to the U.S. population."
For transgender youth, racial/ethnic identification is as follows:
Latinx - 1.8%
AIAN (American Indian Alaskan Native) - 1.8%
All other races - 1.5%
Black - 1.4%
White - 1.3%
Asian - 1.0%"
If we take non-white/non-Asian populations to be more likely to be living in poverty, that probably answers the question:
It is fairly hard to get taken into care (at least from what I've seen of it, in places where my immediate reaction was "this family is so dysfunctional, even the crappy care system would be better" but social workers operate (now?) on "keep the family together as much as possible".
So if the situation was that the kid was in danger because of their family's attitude to them being gay or whatever, they might be taken into care. But not just because the parents don't approve/accept, and especially if the family is otherwise better off (e.g. middle-class).
Although that might be changing; refusal to accept/validate LGBT identity might be classed as emotional abuse:
"Neglect: Neglect encompasses several areas, including not fulfilling a child's needs for food, a clean living environment, or emotional well-being. It is extremely difficult to prove emotional abuse but it often plays a part in physical and sexual abuse."
"CHILD MALTREATMENT: The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA)
definition of child abuse and neglect is, at a minimum: Any recent act or failure to act on
the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm,
sexual abuse or exploitation; or an act or failure to act, which presents an imminent risk of
serious harm.
MALTREATMENT TYPE: A particular form of child maltreatment that received a CPS
response. Types include medical neglect, neglect or deprivation of necessities, physical abuse,
psychological or emotional maltreatment, sexual abuse, and other forms included in state law.
NCANDS conducts analyses on maltreatments that received a disposition of substantiated or
indicated.
PSYCHOLOGICAL OR EMOTIONAL MALTREATMENT: Acts or omissions—other
than physical abuse or sexual abuse—that caused or could have caused—conduct, cognitive,
affective, or other behavioral or mental disorders. Frequently occurs as verbal abuse or excessive demands on a child’s performance."
"Psychological or emotional maltreatment" is only a small percentage of CPA investigations, at least by 2017 report data:
Table 3–10 Maltreatment Type Combinations, 2017
MALTREATMENT TYPE COMBINATIONS Maltreatment Type Maltreatment Type Percent
SINGLE TYPE - -
Neglect includes Medical Neglect 422,334 62.7
Other/Unknown 19,539 2.9
Physical Abuse 74,195 11.0
Psychological or Emotional Maltreatment 15,476 2.3
Sexual Abuse 44,951 6.7
Total Single Type 576,495 85.6
TWO TYPES - -
Neglect and "Other"/Unknown 25,195 3.7
Neglect and Physical Abuse 35,018 5.2
Neglect and Psychological Maltreatment1 12,825 1.9
Neglect and Sexual Abuse 9,245 1.4
Physical Abuse and "Other"/Unknown 614 0.1
Physical Abuse and Psychological Maltreatment 5,684 0.8
Physical Abuse and Sexual Abuse 1,498 0.2
Sexual Abuse and Psychological Maltreatment 416 0.1
Total Two Types 90,495 13.4
THREE TYPES - -
Neglect, Physical Abuse, and Psychological Maltreatment 3,390 0.5
Neglect, Physical Abuse, and "Other"/Unknown 1,273 0.2
Neglect, Physical Abuse, and Sexual Abuse 1,002 0.1
Total Three Types 5,665 0.8
REMAINING COMBINATIONS 1,175 0.2
NATIONAL 673,830 100.0"
So "my parents don't like it that I'm gay" on its own would need to be very severe and even there it seems to be an extremely minor rate as compared to other instances of neglect. If the parents are beating and physically neglecting the child's needs, then it is something more urgent to be investigated, but if it's "Mom cries about and Dad says he never expected this" then it's not enough.
That's a good question. I agree that "rate of being raised in poverty" is not at all the same as "rate of living in poverty", especially for a population like that. I remember seeing something on UK data but I could not find it. Curiously, on US data, I could not find a clear study either. A lot of studies are clearly non-representative. There is probably an answer in private data of https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/hsls09/ .
There is however a hint at the answer in columns 4 and 5 of Table 4 in this article https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775719302791 Basically, it says that trans children rate of obtaining a high school diploma is lower than that of cis children (column 4) but that penalty halves once one adjusts for family socio-economic factors (column 5). Penalty decrease on the adjustment means that trans children in this study on average come from lower status families. I do not think that this is an entirely satisfactory answer to your question though.
Either way, all this data points in the direction of transgendered people being on average lower SES than I assumed, and I'll adjust my picture accordingly. Thanks for posting it!
The basic question is: what in the parents' status, education, living place, specific way they care about their children's wellbeing, you name it ... affects whether the child goes to public/private/religious school or is homeschooled/ unschooled. All of those things could directly affect the outcomes we see here (life satisfaction, being poorer or richer, ...).
I find the results interesting to read, and I don't disagree with Scott's conclusions. I think this type of presentations tempts to read more into those numbers than they actually tell you. Well, maybe ACX readers are exceptionally good at resisting such temptation?
The main problem here is that while most American public schools are similar, each home school is very different. It seems wrong to try to make a cohesive group out of homeschoolers.
I think the problem isn't exactly variance. I think there are distinct sub-groups within the homeschooling community so this is a bit like comparing stats for, say, lions vs a collection of "sheep, giraffes, snakes and humans." The average height for lions makes sense. The average height for the collection can be computed but doesn't make as much sense.
I agree with this. At minimum, there's a pretty big distinction between religious and secular homeschooling families. In the US, the religious homeschoolers are the majority (I don't know how much Covid shifted that).
I was raised upper middle class in a very rich area and went to one of the best public schools in the country. The area also has some of the best private schools in the country. In terms of the quality there was little difference between public and private so the decision families made were mostly about signaling or similar social things.
How do you differentiate between home schooling and "unschooling but encouraged to learn unstructured"? It seems more like different pedagogies than different categories. And if you are truly unschooled i.e. no one bothered to give you an education, and you couldn't avail yourself to the public option, I would tend to assume a broken home...
Unstructured learning does sound interesting for some kind of students (highly intelligent AND highly curious AND highly self disciplined and possibly adverse to standard socialisation) but highly dangerous for the rest of us, even the weirdos/nerds amongst us. I know there's no way I would have put myself through any kind of complex scientific topic if I hadn't been forced to.
OTOH, it's not like my career or hobbies really involve or necessitate lots of scientific knowledge...
As someone who was homeschooled and some people have described as unschooled, I agree that the distinction is too fuzzy to throw out for self categorization. And it is trendy enough that two people receiving the same schooling might describe their schooling as either depending on when they grew up.
Unstructured means without a curriculum? Not 5 days a week? Without the parent ever telling the kid anything? Not push someone do something that is effectively educational when they didn't want to do it?
What if a textbook was used once or twice for math, but never for English, half unschooled?
Unschooled, at least as I use the term, means that nobody required you to learn particular things in particular ways. So no curriculum. Not 5 days a week. With parents telling the kids lots of things and the kids free to get interested in those things and pursue them or not. A textbook used if the kid wants, possibly suggested by a parent.
In our case the only pushing was nagging the kids to learn the multiplication tables. Our now adult daughter thinks that was a mistake.
But a lot of parents fall in to a gray area in between. No curriculum, not 5 days a week, but yes on this road trip we're talking about spelling. Or "it's time to learn X now" (and stopping if there was a legitimate complaint). Or "Hey, look at this cool theater group" pushing-but-not-forcing moving into "You've started so you must finish X period out, you committed to it in the beginning."
Among people with a school background, a lot of people would look at that as unschooling. Among unschoolers (in my area) they would look at that as homeschooling.
Then there are the people who take their kids out of school, but send them to learning centers / co-ops 5 days a week for 5-8 hours/day. They were part of homeschooling groups in my area, but the people who actually did education at home would not describe them as homeschoolers.
We certainly did a lot of getting our kids interested in things. My wife and I alternated who put which kid to bed, spent about half an hour doing it, and talked with them. That included my reciting poetry, my wife singing, my making up algebra puzzles — two equations in two unknowns rigged to have integer solutions, for the kid to do in his head—making up stories and telling them. We talked about things.
But except for the multiplication tables, it was all a matter of getting the kids interested in something and then helping them explore it. I made some attempt to get them interested in math, but with little success. They finally taught themselves what was needed to do well on the math SAT because they wanted to get into good colleges.
On the other hand, both of them know a lot of poetry, my son is trying to be a novelist and my daughter is an online free lance editor, mainly of fantasy.
"And if you are truly unschooled i.e. no one bothered to give you an education, and you couldn't avail yourself to the public option, I would tend to assume a broken home..."
Unschooling doesn't mean that nobody bothered to help you get educated, it means that nobody forced you to learn the particular things he wanted you to learn at the times and in the ways that he preferred.
Your statement is like saying that if kids are not force fed they will starve to death.
We "unschooled" though there are various reasons why I resist the term, but David's description of it is the same I would use. In the homeschooling world, there are parents who neglect their children. I think it's better to call that neglect. Unschooling is its own pedagogy and unschooling is a good term for it.
As a side note, I want to clarify the reason I resist the term has to do with who the prominent voices were in unschooling near us while we were doing it and not wanting to be associated with people I found to be rude, dogmatic a**holes. Not because I think there's anything wrong with the term.
I did a quick ordinal regression looking at school satisfaction predicted by schooling * childhood class. I dropped unschooling due to low n across class categories, and similarly combined "rich" and "upper middle" for the same reason.
Childhood social class had a strong and consistent effect on school satisfaction, with OR of 1.69 for the second lowest social class category compared to the lowest, 2.56 for the next highest compared to the lowest and 3.31 for the highest compared to the lowest. All significant to p<0.001.
For school category, there was a "borderline significant" difference between home schooling compared to public schooling OR=3.01, p=0.56. Neither of the other two comparisons were close to significant, though trended in the direction of both being higher than public schooling (but the confidence intervals were extremely wide i.e. OR=0.69-3.6 for religious vs public school.
What is the "school satisfaction" variable in the dataset that you used for the RHS variable? I'm looking at the 'ACXSPublic2022.csv' posted but not seeing the school satisfaction variable.
The average age was about 30, which is very similar to the average age from the 2014 survey (29) from 9 years ago. So it looks like the readers aren't ageing along with blog. Which suggest people tend to loose interest over their 30s and get replaced with new readers in their 20s. It definitely seems like this blog is a thing that specifically-guys-in-their-late-twenties enjoy.
It's reinforcing my suspicion that curiosity/mental acuity peaks around age 30 and drops off pretty strongly afterwards. It's when a lot of the great physicists/mathematicians made their discoveries (Newton, Einstein etc. Scott himself?).
I'd like to ask the 40 year old guys why they lost interest, but I guess they're not around to answer.
Have any older guys who do still read the blog experienced anything like a loss in intellectualism/curiosity?
Late 30s guy here, have been reading Scott since the Squid314 days, was an avid reader and /r/ssc participator a decade ago.
I think a big part of it for me is that I just don't have the same amount of free time to be spending on the Internet. In 2013 I was in my late 20s, partnered but living alone, and was in the early stage of my academic career.
Now in 2023 I'm in my late 30s, married with a young kid, and my academic career has progressed to the point that I'm in charge of a bunch of stuff (lecturing, supervising grad students, faculty admin nonsense, etc).
Subjectively it feels like my intellectual curiosity is still as vigorous as ever, but I just don't have the time (or inclination) to be part of an internet community anymore.
Also, not to demean Scott, but from my perspective the blog has gotten a little less interesting with time. I feel like between 2013-2016 almost every post provided fascinating reading that opened my eyes to new ways of thinking. These days I'm much more likely to find articles less interesting (I don't really care about prediction markets or crypto, for example, which are some of Scott's major interests these days). Again, nothing against Scott: he's still one of the best essayists in the world, in my opinion. It's just that his interests and mine have drifted apart a little over the years.
I'm ~50, remain very curious, and read broadly. I think the blog covers less-interesting subjects more frequently, as you state, but I also think the quality is decreasing in the last year or so. I'm patiently waiting to see if it is a monotonic trend.
Late 50s woman here, no dropoff, have been a reader here for ... is over a decade possible at this point? I'm more or less the opposite demographic of the majority readership here, except that I'm also a smart nerdy person.
I find this space as interesting as I did from the beginning. My capacity for it rises and falls but I don't feel like there's been any decline in quality of posts.
What my wife referred to early on as the refugee forum. It was started after SSC shut down and before ACX existed by and for the SSC commenting community, and is still running. I like the forum format, since it makes it easy to follow threads that interest me and ignore ones that don't.
I think the posting community has more libertarians than here and some conservatives, so I get to listen to conservative positions held by intelligent people, which is an interesting perspective. One recent thread was started by a Spanish (Basque) lady who said she agreed with the Catholic church about everything except the existence of God.
Do we know that readers are losing interest in their 30s? If readership were growing and new readers were typically younger (which seems plausible), then average age could remain static or decline, even if no readers were leaving.
I think the growth rate would have needed to have been really high and continuous for that maths to work out. And it'd still be notable that the new readers were overwhelming younger guys.
From discussions Scott has had about moving to ACX, I think this may in fact be true? As with all such situations, there's likely a number of readers who drop out as well, which would tend to be older (since the reverse is impossible - you can't stop reading at a younger age than you started!).
This does mean that new readers are overwhelmingly younger, which seems true in either case with some range in how young and how many depending on working theory.
I'm in my 50s. I don't think my level of intellectual curiosity has changed much over the years, though I am of course slightly stupider, and have less energy and free time, than when I was say 25.
I'm not too far over the average yet, so it might be too early for me to speculate, but:
Reading this blog is easy enough that I don't see myself aging out of it. On the other hand, filling out surveys? It's very tempting to say "I've filled out this survey for the past N years. It takes forever. I'm really busy right now. Maybe next year?"
I'm a little shocked that at 42 I'm 10+ years older than the average reader, although the survey is from Jan 2020 so possibly less now. (And I wasn't a regular reader until the Substack appeared, so I doubt I even took the survey myself.)
Certainly with two kids I have less time for deep thinking and/or internet communities, but frankly I'm not sure how much time I ever spent on that compared to, like, computer games.
I'm in my mid-30s. Opened the poll. Had to walk away for kid. Almost forgot to finish it. I also often read the blog in batches every few weeks; sometimes I have a substack Tuesday morning or whatever where I catch up for a few hours. I bet there's a lot of that going on. Maybe fewer readers, but definitely fewer pollees.
Woman approaching 40. Still curious, just have 2 small children. I’ve given up a lot of pursuits to raise my kids- there just isn’t time. But reading this blog and hosting meetups are vital intellectual outlets for me in this period. Which won’t last forever; once my kids are older I hope to return to my own writing in a more focused way.
Not directly on topic, but I was surprised how old the readership was. I'm 19 and I expected the average reader to be maybe 25 or a little older. I guess the average reader is actually quite similar to Scott.
I'm 30; I've been a reader of the blog for almost 10 years now. I still currently read every article, but I'm going to have my first kid in a few months and I would not be surprised if I simply didn't have time to read after that....
Funny enough, the first few months after having the kid you often have a lot of time to read. Especially if they have a tendency to fall asleep on you (like mine did). The difficulty there is having any brain power to understand what you're reading.
I can't speak to trends with respect to Scott's blog, but with respect to the larger question, I would say my pure intellectual curiousity is at least as strong now as at any time before. However, it's different, viz.:
In my teens and 20s, a fair amount of my intellectual curiousity could, in retrospect, be better labeled as a drive to become more attractive to women. That is, I learned skills and knowledge more so that I could attract the kind of girl I found interesting. Stuff like how to fix things, or be knowledgeable about the world and its ways, or do well at predicting the short-term future, or be qualified for a highly-paid high-status job. I would be interested in stuff that was cool and hip or maybe edgy, which brought me social status or influence, but less so in stuff that was discouraging or ugly (e.g. practical end of life issues) or which had no social glamor at all.
Through most of middle age, as a parent and early to mid-career, my interests became a lot more focussed and practical. I viewed a fair amount of the stuff that fascinated me in my 20s as intellectual wankery, which was of no practical importance, or which turned out to have been discussed to death by ages of men before me, and I just needed to discover that I wasn't the only one to think of them. I became interested in practical stuff like how you find good schools, how you deal with rebellious teens, how to make your way through a social heirarchy with which you may not entirely agree but which, practically speaking, governs you life -- rejecting as delusional the notion of youth that it could, or would, be remade better within my lifetime. I got interested in the basics of personal finance and family economics, the practical lessons that let a marriage succeed as a working partnership and not so much a sexual adventure cruise. I became a lot less interested in speculative fiction (seeing it more often as self-induglent narcissism, and less original than I had thought when I was wet behind the ears), and more interested in biography and history, the stories of real people struggling with practical problems.
In late middle age to early old age, with most of the practical issues of my life settled, one way or the other, I find my curiousity has become less practical but also not recovered its youthful shotgun nature -- roughly, any thing that uses big words or complex math must be cool -- and tends to be more pure and more focussed on existential issues. How do we find meaning in life, given the certainty of death? How do we truly understand people who are quite different from us? What is the true meaning of friendship or of kinship? What is really worth saying or learning, or practicing, because it makes life worthwhile even if it brings no social advantage, no valuable social interaction -- something that would be valuable even on a desert isle? With the perspective of decades, what can be noticed about those who come after us, younger, and what is useful and valuable to convey to them, or learn from them? What can be noticed about those who came before us, as they march steadily into the forever night -- what should we ask them, before it's too late? What should we convey or learn from them? And, in both directions, what can be noticed as eternally true about the progression of the human soul from cradle to grave, and what does it mean about our nature, and our relationship to God (or whatever locus of meaning one wishes to keep central)? I say it's more "pure" because I don't really care at all whether anyone else is interested in the problem, and I don't have any strong motivation to share what I think with others -- I'm a pure "student" with no idea of becoming a "teacher".
When I was much younger, I prized new experiences and new ideas -- climbing McKinley, learning general relativity or the tango, meeting new people. Now I tend to prize deepening my understanding of people, and mostly people I know. What new understanding can I gain of my mother and father, as I approach ages myself when as a kid I considered them "old people?" What new understanding can I gain of my children, as they approach ages when I considered myself all grown up? How can I understand more deeply what it's like to be this friend or that acquaintance?
I don't think I would characterize any one stage as better than the one before or afterward, or say overall there was a general advancement. It feels more like to every thing there is a season, and the seasons of life correspond to different types of curiosity, and curiosity about different things.
I’m in my thirties, and I’m actually surprised today I don’t remember my SAT scores at all. Or even the GRE. I’m pretty sure I remembered them for years after, but at some point they vanished. Do me a favor and look at the most recent survey for people who left the SAT question blank, and maybe you can find the average age we forget at…
I'd like Scott to include the option for ACT scores in the future, I have to think a sizeable chunk of midwestern readers took that but never the SAT. Let me brag about my perfect reading score on an anonymous internet survey, I'm begging you.
I had also forgotten my scores (and somehow only had recorded in my notes the combined CR+M (1600) score), so I went to retrieve my scores from College Board. What a wild goose chase.
I last took the test in 2015, so I still have my login. But in the interim, College Board switched login systems (previously they used a username, now an email is required) so I have to re-enroll my account. All my information is accurate on the account, so it’s the right one, but my scores aren’t there. There’s a “Score Match” tool for looking up old results, but the second field is a dropdown with test dates only going back through the beginning of 2022.
I eventually found a scholarship form I filled out in high school that had the information.
I had a similar experience. Wound up getting the results spreadsheet from the *last* survey and filtering it to find my own entry. No idea how I found it the first time.
I'm kind of surprised how many people could still access their scores after so long. Maybe part of the selection effect is that you're more likely to remember a more impressive score?
Yeah this was the first of these surveys i couldn't quickly remember. I am in my thirties as well. I could remember my total score but had to work out the components.
Right. Take the sqrt of the number in each category, and make that a +/- percentage. For only 16 people is some category the random uncertainty is large. 16 +/- 4.
> Yes, these are the averages of hundreds or thousands of SAT scores in each cell. I *told you* that you were heavily-selected and weird. Given the level of selection effects, I’m not sure we can conclude much here.
I should call out another selection effect in those scores that is only obvious if you're familiar with SAT scores.
The SAT-math is much easier than the SAT verbal. Accordingly, a score of X doesn't mean the same thing on the math that it does on the verbal - it's more impressive as a verbal score than it is as a math score.
But the average SSC SAT scores are significantly higher on the verbal side than they are on the math side. This is not expected; a typical population would have equal ability on both sides, which would translate to the math scores being higher than the verbal scores. SSC readers appear to be noticeably bad at math (given their high IQs).
(The scores also provide strong support for the theory that school has little effect on verbal performance at the same time that it has a pronounced effect on mathematical performance.)
That's what I noticed. That math scores went down for home schooling and tanked for unschooling strongly implies that math is more learned than verbal is, since verbal scores were much more consistent.
> strongly implies that math is more learned than verbal is
I wouldn't draw that inference. Verbal SAT questions are thoroughly "learned"; this isn't Raven's Progressive Matrices. The characterization I've seen, which seems right to me, is that if you don't make kids read in school, they'll go ahead and read independently (resulting in essentially the same performance, because they trained themselves), whereas if you don't make kids do math in school, they mostly won't do math on their own time, and the result is performance substantially below where they would have been had they been forced into doing more math.
Think of it this way: kids will naturally provide enough verbal self-training to reach the saturation point where additional training has almost no effect, but they provide much less math self-training than that.
The implication of my model is that providing more math in school is likely to quickly hit ceilings, but providing less math in school _will_ cause math scores to drop. (Whereas providing more reading in school is also likely to hit ceilings, but providing less reading in school will quickly hit floors.)
> SSC readers appear to be noticeably bad at math (given their high IQs).
Or "noticeably good at verbal stuff, given their IQ" works too!
That is interesting and quite surprising I think, I would have expected the reverse. Perhaps the blog form attract people comparatively more interested in "verbal things"?
> Or "noticeably good at verbal stuff, given their IQ" works too!
That's true. If 5 is low compared to 50, then 50 is also high compared to 5.
There is a related observation you can make about the general relationship between mathematical and verbal ability. A "flat" profile is defined by reference to a European white population, but worldwide there are two different profiles and no particular reason to think of one as being more Platonically flat than the other one. Taking "flat" as the psychometric 'shape' of whites, blacks are also flat. But East Asians and Amerindians show much stronger spatial than verbal ability (relative to the "flat" shape).
Asians are high performers and they are generally thought of as being "strong" in math as opposed to "remarkably weak with words given their high math scores". It might be interesting to see if low-performing Amerinds are thought of as being "extra weak verbally", "showing a much smaller deficit than expected" in math, or if discussions of them mostly just ignore the phenomenon.
Anyway, the reported SAT scores show that the psychometric profile of SSC readers does not match the normal profile of the population they're drawn from (even restricting the source population to the high end); it is biased toward verbal ability relative to mathematical ability.
Or SSC is just exceptionally difficult to read and thus attracts people high in verbal SAT. I like to read some quite challenging books for fun (Gravity's Rainbow, Bible, Silmarillion) for fun, and there are some SSC posts which are so dense I didn't read them in one piece (meditations on moloch).
The big postmodern tomes like Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Infinite Jest are still a clear cut above SSC, but if you can read SSC for pleasure you can read those aswell.
That one's an interesting case. I read it mostly because that seemed like the type of thing I should do, and reading it is a pain. But I noticed that people really liked being told the stories from the Silmarillion, once I'd read it. It seems to be a case where the plotting is very good and the writing quality is terrible.
It'd be very interesting to see what Neil Gaiman would produce if he were to rewrite the Silmarillion.
Is that at all surprising, given the Silmarillion is all unpublished drafts? the core plot is done first, but polished beautiful writing takes many rounds of editing
Well, I wouldn't claim that my impromptu oral rendition of stories from the Silmarillion was particularly polished. So the writing quality appears to be *below* the basic level you'd get by just writing down whatever came into your head; work has gone into making the text unreadable.
I think there are good reasons for that - the text is supposed to be reference material supporting the story of The Lord of the Rings, and so that "unreadability" work pays dividends elsewhere in things like self-consistency over a long text describing a very wide set of events, in storing the information in a compact form, and probably in organizing it such that it's easier to find material that you know you're looking for. But it's worth remarking on the phenomenon anyway.
Actually I think this is one of the few educational differences that shows up consistently across different surveys of homeschoolers. They are a little better on verbal measures and a little worse on math.
Does age at taking the SAT have the same effect? For example the first time I took it (age 13 or 14) my verbal was higher than math, but the last time I took it (age 16) my verbal was still higher but math was a lot closer. Then I took the GRE (age 25) and my math score was finally higher (but still a lower percentile).
I am not aware of such an effect, nor am I aware of any particular result saying it shouldn't happen. My default assumption would be that performance in everything rises over time (until you reach the age at which the SAT is targeted); I would be more interested in percentile-to-percentile comparisons than in score-to-score ones. Scores are worse-defined than percentiles are.
If you want to look at how scores develop as the subject ages, I can provide my own:
Age 12: 720 V, 630 M. I don't have the score sheet any more, so I'm not sure what percentiles those were. The verbal score, but not the math score, qualified me for SET due to being a score that exceeded 700 below the age of 13.
Age 13: 790 V: 710 M. In "points", math has caught up a bit, behind by only 80 instead of 90. The gap is very wide, though; the math score is 95th percentile and the verbal is 99+. Once again, the verbal score qualified for SET (it exceeded 700 by 10 points for every month over the age of 13), and the math score didn't.
Age (probably) 16, PSAT: 80 V, 78 M. PSAT scores are, for no particular reason, SAT scores divided by 10.
Age (probably) 17, SAT: 800 V, 780 M.
Age (certainly) 17: 800 V, 800 M.
I only have the scoresheet for that final one. It seems pretty clear that the 780 represents my true ability and I got lucky the third time around. 800 verbal and math are both reported as "99th" percentile, but the verbal score is certainly 99+ and rarer than the math score. There is also a note on the score sheet that suggests most 800s are due to good luck: "On average, a person with a verbal score of 800 loses 53 points on a second testing. [...] On average, a person with a math score of 800 loses 49 points on a second testing." (Or, of course, people retaking might be systematically different than people only taking the test once. I wouldn't expect retakers to be biased toward people whose first score was obviously too high, though.)
Age 23, GRE: 750 V, 780 M. Here the math score is higher by 30 "points", but yet again points don't mean anything. The verbal score is reported as 99th percentile (still probably 99+, but this is less of a sure thing than the SAT score) and the math score is 89th percentile.
My default assumption is that most of what's happening between the SAT and the GRE is that more-or-less identical performance is being scored differently and then compared to a very different group of people. The difference between SAT at age 12 and SAT at age 17 is probably more reflective of acquisition of knowledge by me. But verbal ability is much stronger than math ability every time they are reported accurately enough to tell the difference; that never changed.
I have never heard that math is easier than verbal; however, the a large amount of the math portion can be made easier by knowing the the patterns of questions they use and the tricks to answer those questions (or at least narrow down the choices). There are few of these tricks with verbal.
In the website below "The average Math score is 528, and the average Evidence-Based Reading and Writing score is 531." If that is true it does not seem obvious that math scores are higher.
My prior is it is easier to each or optimally hone verbal skills in a homeschooling/unstructured setting than it is math skills, especially when the math skills are tested under pressure and requiring attention to detail (e.g. you solve for x, the question asks "what's x+5").
For verbal skills, you develop that by a lot of reading, which can be very self-directed. For math, there are those who will do any amount of math for fun, but a lot of times you have to drill it, until you're factoring, managing fractions, etc. Automatically and not having to think about it every time.
I suspect whatever curriculum one follows, without one's own dedication to seeing it through, a good curriculum, and one's own comfort with the topic, a homeschooling parent might not emphasize drilling the algebra-level and geometry that you need for the SAT math to be easy.
I was homeschooled and agree with this. My mom was my primary teacher, and was not very strong on math. For verbal this was fine because I read a lot, between self-selected and curriculum. For math it's a lot harder to just read and understand - though our math books did a decent job of explaining what was going on. I think around 9th or 10th I felt like I was losing track of how math worked (since it's built on previous levels that I understood but not great), and struggled to go through Trig and Physics. I did fine on Algebra and most things in Geometry. We found some tutors through a homeschooling support group that helped, but it was infrequent compared to daily learning of the verbal side.
This is surprising, since when I asked people if they were more STEM (1) or more humanities (5), the average was towards STEM (2.2). Also, between a third and half of respondents are programmers or other computer workers.
Is skilled computer programming correlated with strong verbal skills? Lots of memorizing definitions, syntax, skimming over a document and extracting key points? Then the language-oriented skills gets co-opted by culture into being defined as STEM?
But they are also STEMish people and programmers who read your blog about concepts, big ideas, history, psychiatry... So not so surprising that they are more verbally inclined than the average STEM person. And it might not be a coincidence that this is also, I suppose, your profile?
I'm not sure what the surprise is. I am part of the subset you appear to be talking about - significantly stronger verbal skills than math skills, but with a pronounced personality inclination toward working with math and computers compared to words and people.
I don't think much of "STEM" as a differentiator. It feels to me like mathematicans and programmers have more in common with historians and philosophers -- other "big ideas and what do they imply?" people -- than with people steeped in empirical study of cold reality, e.g. aero/astro engineers or med chemists. I would distinguish the theoreticians from the experimentalists, that is, and think the theoreticians have more in common with the humanities people than with the experimentalists.
The experimentalists in turn have more in common with people in very practical occupations, like farmers, police and surgeons, truck drivers, machinists. I can readily see a truck driver getting really into the chemistry of combustion, say, or a mechanical engineer building and learning to fly an ultralight as a hobby. Similarly, I can see a mathematician or programmer being deeply interested in philosophy or history, or a mathematician or philosopher becoming a programmer.
Mathematicians, programmers, engineers, and chemists all have the thing where the answers they propose will either be correct/workable, or *proven* false/unworkable. Historians and philosophers never have to face that music, which changes their field enormously.
This is as you note a point in common with a lot of blue-collar work; the years spent in academia is the differentiator there.
I agree it's not entirely clearcut, and to be more useful one would have to color in a lot of gray areas, but I don't fully agree with you. What determines "correct" seems to me quite different in both areas. For a chemist or mechanical engineer (or farmer), "correct" is determined by Mother Nature: the synthesis produces the right molecule, or it doesn't. The airplane flies or crashes. The crop is good or it fails.
For mathematicians and programmers, "correct" is determined by a system of rules that are invented by human beings. Your math is correct if it is consistent with the axioms of mathematics. Your program is correct if it is consistent with the rules of the programming language, the operating system, the underlying instruction set (and of course if it achieves what you wanted it to achieve).
I think there is a subtle but important difference here. The correctness according to rules and mechanisms we humans have invented is something that can be finally determined, generally. You can know whether a program is correct or not with 100% certainty (if you pursue it with sufficient effort). There are definitely undecideable propositions in math, but these are in some sense known to arise from the rules of math we have constructed. And if you stay outside those areas, I think generally your math is going to be either definitely correct or definitely wrong.
Human rules are also subject to human revision, e.g. one can draw conclusions about geometry that are "wrong" according to Euclid, but then along comes Riemann and we broaden the axioms and you can be right instead. We can change the rules of programming, so not declaring the type of your variable isn't wrong any more, or we can change an operating system or the underlying silicon so what was an error before becomes OK.
But when correctness is determined by Nature, it is first of all not always possible to finally determine correctness. Maybe the synthesis worked by accident, or for reasons you don't understand. Maybe the crop came in or failed by luck, and had nothing to do with your decisions. And also, the rules cannot be changed by any amount of human creativity or will. We can't broaden the definition of "flight" to include "the wings snap off and the fuselage plummets to Earth -- but in an unusually elegant and interesting swoop."
Another way to put it is that the structure within which you must work as a mathematician, programmer, historian, philosopher, lawyer, or linguist is that which humans have created themselves. But if you're an engineer, a physicist, chemist, biologist, farmer, machinist, et cetera, you have to work within a structure that was *not* created by humans -- it arose from Nature, is completely unresponsive to our wishes to change it, and we must discover it.
An important gray area is of course that as a practical matter even practical professions have to work within human structure -- farmers must cope with the law and economics, physicists have to use math, engineers must work within economics and law. And on the other side, we humans can and do often set up systems the full nature of which we don't know at the time we beget them, and so working within those systems there is a certain amount of empirical discovery that does take place: programmers can explore the consequences of a new language by experiment, lawyers can discover new penumbras and emanations, linguists can discover new ways in which language evolves in surprising ways.
But it still feels like the underlying distinction is sufficiently important that it helps group people better by attitudes they acquire by the nature of their work, e.g. how skeptical they are about novelty[1], than saying everyone who masters mathy stuff belongs in one camp, and everyone who recognizes a Cicero or Shakespeare quote belongs in another.
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[1] I'm reminded of the tale about Edison, who supposedly said after some iteration of an invention "all right boys, let's start her up and see why she doesn't work."
> For mathematicians and programmers, "correct" is determined by a system of rules that are invented by human beings. Your math is correct if it is consistent with the axioms of mathematics. Your program is correct if it is consistent with the rules of the programming language, the operating system, the underlying instruction set (and of course if it achieves what you wanted it to achieve).
That is absolutely not how programmers think about correctness. If it's consistent with the rules, your program will compile and run without indicating that it is in crisis. (It may also do that if it isn't consistent with the rules. But in that case, we complain about the misbehavior.) But being consistent with the rules is completely unrelated to whether it achieves anything at all; the only thing that counts is whether the program does what you want it to do.
Programming is a subfield of math (particularly the aspect of math that is interested in questions like 'how many logical operators do I need to postulate in order to be able to assemble everything else I want from them? One? OK, but NAND is the worst operator in the world, what if I go ahead and use two?'), but programmers are often terrible at math.
> You can know whether a program is correct or not with 100% certainty (if you pursue it with sufficient effort).
This is laughably false. The fact that this can't be done is one of the most famous results in computer science.
I am not sure that STEM is so much of a differentiator. Interests can diverge along many dimensions, as shown, for example, by the old but well-validated Holland's map of vocational and leisure interests (the RIASEC model).
If I understand you correctly, you are talking here about the experimental/practical versus intellectual/theoretical divide, which corresponds quite well to the Realistic/doing/things versus Investigative (ideas) dimensions of the RIASEC model. I also think that this blog selects for people with a high attraction to the Ideas dimension, and that this is not very highly correlated with STEM (although it is correlated with higher education, which is part of STEM).
The above distinction is about the kind of method/approach people like to use to study or work on their interests. But another dimension is the kind of things that people are interested in, and one of the main differentiators here is the People vs. Things dimension. It seems to me that this blog is much more concerned with things than people (probably atypical for a psychiatrist!), which correlates well with STEM interests.
My main takeaway is that effect size on everything is surprisingly low. Is it just that almost everybody rates life satisfaction in the same fairly narrow range? Due to hedonic treadmill etc.
Do we know that it's a narrow range since the values Scott gives are averages within each category? The bell curve of life satisfaction may be the same or different within each category of schooling and we wouldn't know, right?
Your relationship question doesn't seem to ask whether the person was EVER married or in a LTR, but a current status. I realise that considering the huge bias towards youthfulness of your population it is less important, but unless you controlled for that, your "singles" will include a substantial % of people who HAD a LTR which ended. For example, I'm a 52 years old widow after a 20+ years of marriage (likely rare but increasing in probability with age) and undoubtedly there will be many divorced people out there. So "not YET" married seems like an overstretch.
It's a weird category because it's made up partly of families who chose it from the outset (therefore already social outliers), and partly of families whose children struggle in school (often because of traits that are bound to have other effects in life). It also covers children who are 'unschooled' at home and those who attend self-directed learning centres. Either way, I can only see the category growing in years to come – I'm very glad Scott is interested in it.
It makes total sense to me to unschool a child who has a bad time in school, but I am more surprised by the families for which this is a first choicce : I would expect that unschooling quite severly limit the type of job one can have, because it seems to me that the majority of jobs requiring "technichal" skills would be impossible. Or maybe unschooling is mostly for younger kids and they come back in high school for example?
My own kids are quite lazy and not very creative. I have got perfect confidence that if I unschool them they will only learn vido games skills, so I am probably quite biased here!
I think the term 'unschooling' probably leads to some misconceptions. 'Self-directed learning' is a better description – so it's certainly possible to sign up for courses in technical skills, or pursue advanced qualifications, even a PhD. But the motivation comes internally, and for the parents it's mainly about being a facilitator for the child's emerging interests. We deal with exactly what you'd expect – wall-to-wall Minecraft and YouTube. But he's also developed an intense interest in geography, history and politics, all of which would probably die instantly if he was doing it in a school setting. I wouldn't advocate it for everyone, but think it should be part of the mix on offer to every child.
It is wonderful that you found the right environment for your kid. I totally agree that it is an excellent solution for some kids, but probably not to all of them.
I realize that it is not clear to me what the legal aspects of unschooling are in the USA? Where I live (France) homeschool is possible but its has recently been made much more restrictive (you now need a reason, like health problem, or the kids has been bullied, etc.). And unschooling is not authorized.
Homeschooling in the US is regulated at the state level and what constitutes oversight of homeschooling families depends entirely on where a person lives that way.
I should add religious families were the leading edge in the US for the right to homeschool and because of our history of strong accommodation for religious minorities, our legal systems allow a lot of room for it. Hippies and other kinds of families road those coattails into the homeschooling space. I believe even the strictest states in the U.S. don't measure up to the most basic ways that other countries regulate homeschooling.
I dated a girl once in college who had been a literal and figurative underground homeschooler in Germany (where it was illegal, and the family, who was working overseas, would secretly do it in the basement).
Our unschooled son taught himself simple probability theory at about ten from a book (_How to Take a Chance_, by the same author and illustrator as _How to Lie with Statistics_, which both our kids liked), because he did role playing games and wanted to be able to calculate the odds of different outcomes. My grandson goes to a public school, but does computer programming at home for fun. So how technical or not the skills learned will depend very much on what the kid is interested in.
Your son is impressive! Did he stay unschooled all his childhood or did he go to highschool for example?
My impression was that many "technical" skills require a not particularly fun, not particularly interesting foundation. Like for engineering, you need reasonably good maths skills, which very few children learn for fun.
My son was unschooled until he went to college. He is currently trying to get established as a fiction author. His main academic interest is history.
I think a kid who really wanted to do engineering or physics or computer programming could push himself into learning the needed math. Neither of ours did. But our daughter wanted to learn a language, decided on Italian, took a college class over the summer and then continued over the year — the school I taught at let her could take courses without being enrolled as an undergraduate —and worked harder on that than I think I have ever worked at a college class. Similarly for harp, one of her other interests. In both cases, doing the work was entirely at her initiative, not ours.
Related to my second-generation homeschooler comment elsewhere in this post: is your grandson that goes to public school a child of one of the kids you unschooled? If so, do you mind sharing the reasoning for him going to public school?
No. He is the son of my first marriage, brought up mainly by my ex-wife and her husband, although he spent summers with us once he was old enough. He went to a suburban Pennsylvania public school.
I'd be very cautions about generalising school type across countries; implications of school type will differ a lot between the US and Europe (and probably even more outside the West).
For example, in the UK a lot of schools, including a big chunk of government schools, and more-or-less all private schools, are "religious" in theory, and to an American would look unacceptably religious - they have chapels and mandatory school prayer (all schools are legally obliged to have weekly collective worship in England and Wales). In practice, these should still be rounded off as secular schools for all intents and purposes, as no-one takes the religion seriously.
In Belgium, there are quasi-private schools paid for by vouchers that are fairly common, but private schools that you pay for are banned for Belgian citizens. Again, some of them are Catholic but this isn't terribly important.
Several countries also have varying degrees of technical school at the secondary education level which focus more on practical/trade skills than academic learning, although these are generally being phased out.
I do think there is still a difference between religious and non-religious schools in the UK. I went to a catholic state school in the UK and I had a clueless creationist science teacher who hadn’t even heard of nuclear fusion. She also thought that mirrors inverted left to right but not upside down, thought that planes stayed aloft due to the Bernoulli effect etc etc etc. I also had an RE teacher who taught us that contraceptive pills work by preventing the fertilised egg from implanting and a lot of PSHE lessons focused on persuading us not to have sex before marriage.
The Bernoulli effect happens, and planes stay aloft, and the two are not unconnected. It would be more correct to say that planes stay aloft because the air pressure below the wings is greater than the air pressure above the wings, which exerts a lifting force on the airplane (and, per Newton, pushes/pulls the air downwards). This happens because the shape and angle of the wing results in an asymmetric flow field with higher dynamic pressure below than above. At least, it does if the pilot arranged for the wing to be at the proper angle.
"Bernoulli effect" is a shorthand explanation that explains part of this. It doesn't explain why the air pressure below the wing is higher than ambient, and it handwaves away the question of why air flowing over the upper surface is moving faster than over the lower surface. But it's easy enough to explain in a few paragraphs and a diagram, and somehow out of several possible few-paragraphs-and-a-diagram explanations, it's the one that won out in the mid-20th-century "explain how an airplane flies without getting bogged down in the nerdy details" competition.
It's not completely wrong, but it is not complete.
The hypothesis that came to mind at seeing that disparity for homeschooled and unschooled people was that for some people, school could be an additional social network that increases access to potential partners, directly or indirectly.
(That was also my thought for the low use of psychedelics.)
Agreed on both. As a homeschooler I had zero access to drugs of any kinds (that I was aware of), and also a smaller dating pool.
We had a support group that got together weekly, with about 70 kids K-12 at one point. My younger sister's cohort *heavily* married each other. My age group didn't work out very well for that, as with a small group even a few not being compatible strongly lowers the possibility of getting together.
Growing up homeschooled in the US, we learned that there were two groups of non-conventionally-schooling families: hippies who didn't want their kids locked inside and forced to recite the Pledge and conform (cf. The Teenage Liberation Handbook), and Christians who didn't want their kids taught to believe in evolution (cf. the loudest group of homeschooling boosters these days, having switched from "evolution" to "woke gender BLM ideology"). These groups interact only at arms' length and have typical pedagogy and ideology differing from the conventional school system in opposite directions, so I'd expect pooling them before analysis to give confusing results.
This isn't exactly captured by homeschooling vs. unschooling (we were hippie homeschoolers), but could be captured pretty well in this dataset by rescoring each "ReligiousBackground" as "hippie" (e.g. Unitarian, atheist) or "trad" (e.g. Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness), and combining homeschooling with unschooling. I'd be interested in doing this and looking at satisfaction, SAT scores, and adult counterculturalism when it's not the middle of the workweek.
In my experience that is true -- the vax issue is often the only thing shared by the religious and secular homeschoolers. But I would say the vaccine issue was not until Covid any kind of primary determinant of whether a family homeschools. Prior to Covid, almost all states in the U.S. had a religious exemption for kids who wanted to go to school and their parents didn't want to vaccinate them.
No this is pre-covid, in fact one of the anti(children) vaxers got the covid vax to feel safe going to visit their older parents. They are moms worried about their kids.
"Would intellectuals/ people who want to provide a better education for gifted/challenged children fall into the hippie camp or a new camp? "
I worked with a former Stanford STEM prof who was homeschooling. He thought that there was a 3rd category to cover this (and not just gifted/challenged children) so he uses a 3-bin categorization model. This bin is newer than the other two.
I'd say that's fair. My parents were intellectuals (Ivy-educated, had high academic goals for us), but clearly affiliated with the hippies socially and pedagogically. We sometimes had playdates with more tiger-parentish intellectual homeschoolers, the kind that were trying to train their kids to become chess grandmasters while using formal curricula to maintain strict grade-level competence in math and reading; these parents definitely avoided the creationists, but also had reservations about us wild forest children.
Okay, some preliminary results from lunch break. I sorted ReligiousBackground based on my knowledge of who is most likely to do religiously motivated homeschooling in the US, into "trad" (Catholic, Protestant, Traditional Chinese, Muslim, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness) or "hippie" (atheist, agnostic, Unitarian, different religions for each parent, Quaker, Baha'i, Jewish), and sorted Schooling into "home" (home or un) or "institutional" (public, private, or religious).
By these definitions, both hippie and trad homeschoolers in this dataset were more approving of their schooling than either hippie or trad institutional schoolers (6.9 and 6.9 vs 5.8 and 5.8). Hippie homeschoolers were most likely to be non-cis (trans or other; 8/35=23%), followed by trad homeschoolers (22/235=10%), hippie institutional schoolers (96/1490=8%), and trad institutionals (251/3214=6%). SAT math scores were 713±59 (hippie) and 694±68 (trad) for homeschoolers, 721±85 (hippie) and 713±81 (trad) for conventional; verbal scores were 761±25, 726±55, 723±81, and 716±75. These results are tracking my priors better than the original categorizations, so I'm interested in exploring them further when I have time.
What is the "approved of schooling" variable you used? I'm looking in the 'ACXSPublic2022.csv' dataset and not seeing it. Maybe I need to look in the excel file.
This is from the 2020 SSC survey linked at the top of the OP; it looks like Scott didn't ask about schooling in the 2022 survey. The question was "School Approval Rating: How much did you like your experience at primary and secondary school? 1=Did not like at all, 10=Liked a lot", answers found in the column 'SchoolApprovalRating' in '2020ssc_public.xlsx'.
There may be a third group consisting of people with a low view of the conventional model of schooling, public and private, people who were bored in school, got their education mostly elsewhere, don't want their kids' schooling to get in the way of their education. That would describe us. I have taught at the college and graduate level and published in two fields in neither of which I ever took a course for credit.
I've known a lot of homeschoolers, and don't know that I ever met one who fit into this category. Closest was a family that was religious but also worked in higher education (father was a college professor and I think the mom also worked as an academic), so could be categorized either way.
Is this to say that you don't know homeschoolers who were secular and well educated and motivated to do homeschooling because school was seen to be not a great option for their smart kids?
I mean, I guess that makes sense just in the sense that something like 90% of homeschoolers are religious. Some portion of the 10% secular ones are perhaps more hippies than professional class. And some portion of the 10% are regular folks of whatever kind of background who are homeschooling because their kids have special needs and the school sucked at helping them.
Hmm, I think a lot hinges on what you mean by "not a great option for their smart kids." I knew secular homeschoolers who had very smart kids. They seemed to more closely align with the "wild forest children" that organoid called them above - but that's a judgement call. I don't know that I ever sat down with them and talked about the philosophical underpinnings of their choice, and whether it may have been more "free range libertarian hippie" or more "Modern pedagogy is flawed, we will have better results training them at home." The one family I probably knew the best, in retrospect, was likely heavily both.
I would agree with your assessment that the remaining 10% is likely split, and likely has a lot of overlap.
Some further results. Continuing to refine the analysis, I restricted the sample to respondents in the U.S. and Canada, and tweaked the religious backgrounds into "religious" and "secular"—in the idiosyncratic sense of "I'd guess that if a U.S. or Canadian family with this religious background chose to homeschool, it would be for [X] reasons", such that "secular" includes Jewish, Buddhist, and Unitarian. There were a total of 3179 school alums from "religious" backgrounds, 1207 from "secular", 209 probably-religious homeschoolers, and 28 probably-secular ones. I plotted mean and 95% CI for numeric responses, and squinted to see which groups are confidently different, with no Bonferroni correction or anything. Wish I could upload graphs!
Distinguishing characteristics: In a reassuring sanity check, religious homeschoolers who read SSC came from much larger families, with a mean ParentingKnowledgeNumber of 4.2 (CI 3.6–4.9) vs around 2.5 for all other groups. Similarly, secular homeschoolers were more likely to have professor parents (mean 0.45 parents, CI 0.2–0.7) than people from religious backgrounds (religious homeschoolers 0.12, secular schooled 0.25, religious schooled 0.16). Political spectrum placement (after growing up and deciding to read ACX, of course) varied in the expected direction but only slightly (religious schooled 4.8, secular schooled 4.2, religious homeschooled 5–5.6, secular homeschooled 3.8–5.1), which is why I backed off from my "hippie" vs "trad" framing.
Success metrics: only religious homeschoolers approved of their schooling confidently more than school alumni (CI 6.6–7.3, vs means around 5.9 for both backgrounds); secular homeschoolers had the same mean but a wide CI from 5.9–7.9. Secular homeschoolers had marginally significantly lower romantic satisfaction (CI 4.2–6.1 vs a mean of ~6.2 and CI <1 for the other groups; for Life, Job, and Social satisfaction, secular homeschoolers had a worse mean than the other groups (which were similar to each other) but with CI fully overlapping. SAT scores were all weirdly high, of course; for verbal scores there was a clear difference (CIs about 735-765 for religious schooled, 745–755 for secular schooled, 745–765 for religious homeschooled, 765–785 for secular homeschooled), but keep in mind that probably only the most academically-minded homeschoolers sat for the test. Scoring "no degree" as 0, high school as 1, <4-year degrees as 1.5, bachelor's as 2, master's as 3, and terminal degrees as 4, school alumni got more degrees (2.4±.1) than homeschoolers (2.0, with religious CI from 1.9 to 2.2 and secular from 1.6 to 2.4).
Other features: The secular homeschoolers were definitely queerer than the others: they averaged a whopping 2.2–3.1 out of 5 on the Likert "would you switch sexes if you could", while all other CIs were between 1.7 and 1.9, and 10–40% were non-cis, compared to 7–13% of religious homeschoolers, 5–8% of secular schoolers, and 4–6% of religious schoolers. Only 64% of the secular homeschoolers were heterosexual, vs. 77–82% of other groups. I was curious about immunology (allergies and acne), organization (tabs and unread emails), and character (imagination, mood, anxiety, and trust in others). None of these clearly distinguished "religious" from "secular" homeschoolers and only one distinguished homeschoolers from schoolers (homeschoolers are more trusting), but secular school alumni clearly had less trust, imagination, and acne than school-goers from their "religious" (basically Christian but not Unitarian, Quaker, or having parents from different traditions) classmates.
Overall I was able to discern the outlines of the "trad" and "hippie" family structures I remembered, but this reanalysis doesn't unlock much additional information except that people raised in secular households away from the middle-school gender conformity police are much more likely to express minority gender and sexual identities in adulthood. This may be because I'm wrong that these two styles cut the homeschooling community at its joints, but could also be because many secular homeschoolers reported a ReligiousBackground that I used to classify them as "religious", or because filtering homeschooling alums by SSC readership erased the cultural differences between these groups, or simply because n=28 wasn't enough to confidently analyze secular homeschoolers. Obviously comparing to a differently-selected sample would be interesting, but adding "was religion a major component of your upbringing?" to future ACX surveys would be very helpful as well!
I was raised homeschooled and have known a *lot* of homeschoolers. My personal take was 80/20 religious/secular and am pleased to see that pan out here as well, even if it's closer to 90/10.
I think there may be another category out there that we're both missing, which may help explain that higher incidence of gender non-conformance. Someone in a different thread mentioned people who went to homeschooling due to issues in school. Some would certainly be trouble-makers who were suspended or expelled, or struggled academically. Another group may be those who didn't if in socially, including those that are non-conforming. Any thoughts on how to separate any of this out? My guess would be that the survey numbers are too small to have confidence in the answers, unfortunately.
Yeah, I agree that those subclusters ought to exist, and there's enough detail across questions to start putting together anecdotes—e.g. you could look at secular vs. religious homeschoolers who are not cishet, and look at how many of each report SAT scores as a proxy for how academically oriented they were. But between the small Ns (e.g. 7 non-cis secular homeschoolers) and the layers of imperfect proxies we'd be relying on, I doubt the results would be very enlightening.
Two more notes. First, non-institutional-schoolers from religious backgrounds mostly (92%) identified as "homeschoolers" rather than "unschoolers" , but so did those from "secular" religious backgrounds (75%), confirming that the grouping of homeschoolers by family religious background is not well-captured by the home/un distinction.
Second, I was wondering if the lower RomanticSatisfaction of secular homeschoolers might be driven by the higher proportion of queer folks among this group having trouble finding partners with appropriate orientation or who accept their identities. It is not: cishet secular homeschoolers have a mean RS of 5.1, vs. 5.3 for non-cishet secular homechoolers, and 6.1–6.7 for the corresponding subgroups of religious and institutionally schooled respondents.
> Wow! Home schooling is even more religious than religious schools!
Well, yes, that's what home schooling is. It's not bespoke tutoring for future Isaac Newtons. It's a way for religious people to keep their kids out of the clutches of the godless state. The energy behind legislation for making it easier to home school your kids comes from religious people.
I have some familiarity with this area because I took my kid out of the public school system during the pandemic, which meant that technically I was a home schooler (we hired a teacher with some other families). The two things you immediately discover when you do this is that 1) it is shockingly easy to take your kid out of public school and 2) you need to look around to find the other secular folks.
For #1, you barely have to do anything at all. Did you imagine that there would be elaborate forms to process, maybe some kind of proof or at least attestation that you are providing a semblance of education to your kid? Perhaps a chat with a state social worker? Nope. Just let the school know, "Hey, we're not sending our kid next year."
Regarding #2, there are tons of home school class materials and curricula available, but a lot of them are things like, "Math, but with Jesus" and "Spare the rod, invite trans Satan into your home."
In case it sounds like I'm anti-home schooling: I'm not. I'm sure there are some parents who do a terrible job home schooling their kids -- it would be shocking if that weren't that case -- but in the main I suspect it works out fine for most families, and of course people are free to instill religious values and beliefs in their children, for better or for worse. But this is very much what home schooling is.
"For #1, you barely have to do anything at all. ... Just let the school know, 'Hey, we're not sending our kid next year.'"
The details are state specific. In California you don't notify your local public school. Other states are more restrictive and some require regular testing of the homeschooled kids (California does not).
But, in general, yes, homeschooling tends to have very little state supervision.
I just read Hawaii's homeschool law and it's much the same as everywhere else. If you don't want to have to standardize test your child, you pay a certified teacher (like $35) to write a one-sentence letter saying your child has made sufficient progress this year. We did this in two states where we lived all the years we homeschooled and it couldn't be easier.
That's not exactly everywhere else (like Texas, which has no reporting requirement and you can write a high school diploma).
And it's four standardized tests at specific grades plus an annual progress report plus the school has wiggle room to push for a bit more (such as declared curriculums). In practice from what I've seen (my mother is currently a teacher in Hawaii) is the schools pressure the parents to leave the child enrolled and just not attend (presumably for financial reasons). I've also known a few unschoolers who had to flee the state because the local principal started cranking up requirements and enforcement. (It isn't clear whether that was because they refused to enroll or just the principal's objection to their lifestyle.)
The culture of that does sound different, though if those stories are from years ago, there were a lot of stories like that years ago. If those are current stories, then yikes.
Maybe I misread the website when I looked -- it seemed to me the testing was one option and the annual assessment by a certified teacher another option and that the tests were therefore avoidable. In states that have a testing option versus a teacher assessment option, the testing is often required every year.
I know there are states laxer than that and there are a few more strict (Maryland last i checked), but it looked like what I was familiar with from the more in-between states. I may be totally wrong about that.
This mostly jives with my experience (homeschool, religious upbringing). Your readership might skew in the direction of liking homeschooling more, though - I liked it mostly because it gave free rein to my curiosity. Some of my friends and siblings who were less intellectually self-driven had a lot harder time with it.
Socially, I'm highly extroverted but didn’t learn that until later in life. I would say that I had a stunted social experience growing up that in turn made me the typical homeschool type: awkward and anxious, etc. I know other kids who were similar. But it took about two years of college to get over 90% of that. In my observation, homeschoolers start off weird, but they figure it out. By my late 20s, I rarely thought about anything that happened in high school and could barely tell the difference between friends who were homeschooled or public schooled.
Looking across my friends and acquaintances, I'm persuaded by the Harvard study idea that loving and supportive parents are much more influential than structural differences in upbringing. I have watched people with cruel, controlling, or highly ideological parents go in much different directions than those whose parents were present, reasonable, and loving - whatever their schooling background. Some of the worst homeschooling outcomes I know aren't really from the homeschooling itself - they are kids whose parents homeschooled them because of their own controlling and narcissistic instincts. One friend in particular is a huge queer anti-homeschooling activist now. Her argument is basically: "if I was in school there would have been other adults who could catch what was going on."
If you're an educated person thinking about homeschooling your kids, I would start with your own motivations, not a theory of education. Why do you really want to do this? If the answer is something along the lines of "I think this would be good for my child," then your kid will probably be fine as long as you make an effort. If it's something like "I want to have full power to craft a culture war weapon that I can then unleash upon the world to validate my ideas," then I guarantee your kid will be all kinds of messed up (and will probably hate you). I'm less familiar with secular private schools, but I imagine the same dynamic exists. If you're sending them to Braxley-Sheaton-Hogwarts because you want them to have the best experience possible, then they'll probably be fine (but they would probably be fine in a government school too). If you're sending them there to try to ensure they carry on the family legacy and make you proud, then they probably won't.
In future analyses, can you put confidence intervals around your means (or give some other measure of spread like standard error)? It’s really easy to do, and it’s hard to eyeball-interpret the differences between means without them.
If you don’t know how to do this: the standard error (I.e. standard deviation of the mean estimate) is the standard deviation / sqrt(sample size), and the simplest way to compute a 95% confidence interval is to multiply the standard error by 1.96 and add/subtract that from the mean.
Adding to this to optimize for Scott's time: It's enough if you additionally report the standard deviation of each numerical value and we can do the rest. If you use Google Sheet, you can simply use =STDEV() function (in between the parentheses write the whole area of the column whose stdev you are interested in) which will correctly use the unbiased estimator. (eg: =STDEV(F2:F) if you want to calculate the standard deviation of the data in the F column and your data lines start from the second row)
I got the following for average life satisfaction with 95% confidence intervals based on the public dataset:
I'm a little surprised at the surprise of how religious home-schoolers are. I consider myself religious, attending a church in my community regularly. But there is a group that is far more religious than my congregation on average, and that is the subset of the community that embraces home schooling. I think they are mostly trying to avoid the 'evil influences' of public education or something to that effect. And I think this is at least common across the whole region where I live. Rather than surprise, I would hypothesize that home-schoolers across the nation are even more religious than the home-schooled ACT readers, and yes, more religious than the average religious school attendees. Keep in mind that many religious schools are Catholic. I'm not trying to disparage the Catholic faith, but it strikes me as one of the least religious religions.
Depending on region, it's estimated 50-90% of homeschoolers are doing it for religious reasons. In the two places we did it, I'd say it was 90% (not us). Of all the religious homeschoolers I spoke with, it was absolutely to shield their child from what they felt was the bad secular influence of public schooling. Though all homeschooling families to some extent are trying to shield their children from what they consider to be various kinds of bad influence of schools, public or otherwise.
I'm not *surprised*, really, but that's because I think there is a bimodal distribution of home-school families, at one peak the intellectual bohemians who feel school is too boring and constrained for their children, and at the other religious conservatives who feel school is too wicked and sinful for their children. The population here is much more closely aligned with one of those than the other.
But, yeah, there's always been a big religious component to homeschooling.
Devil's advocate position on my own subgroup: I wonder if homeschoolers (not specifically those in your sample, but all of us) might not be slightly conditioned to answer higher on "are you happy, was homeschooling good" type surveys. There's a thing where a lot of people will ask you those questions in an adversarial way - i.e. "Isn't it hard to be homeschooled, considering you are a friendless loser freak?" or "What do you think about homeschooling your kids, considering it will ruin them forever and ever?"
When that happens, I think one of the normal human reactions to that is to be like "No, it's great, in pretty much every way", because if you say admit to any flaws at all in any tone at all, sometimes the reaction you get is "See, I knew it was a horrible practice in every way and that I can now smugly look down on you for it".
I've been trying to figure out a way this kind of effect could even be quantified, if it exists. Were gay marriages more likely to report happiness shortly after national legalization because they knew it was a politically relevant question? What about transitioners? What about the religious in general?
I feel a little of this. If you don't think it's terrible, you feel a certain need to defend it because people come in with so many assumptions about you.
I like that observation. In the gay example, one possibility is to survey over several years and see if there’s significant change. Then hope, that the change can be explained because of initial novelty ... yeah, right, I guess it’s nigh impossible?
But also: it's getting better-- with a significant improvement since COVID, maybe due to the huge jump in the number of homeschoolers that resulted, but also thanks to the huge number of parents who had to do distance-learning at home with their kids, and were happy to send them back to school...
There was a definite adversarial tone toward homeschoolers when I was a kid (I went mostly to religious schools, but did homeschool a couple of years) and all through young adulthood, but now that I am homeschooling my own... perhaps it's a regional thing, but attitudes are VERY different now. I take my kids out on errands with me during school hours and it is common for some random woman (always a woman) in a shop to ask if my kids are homeschooled, and then go on to say something like "I thought they might be-- they're so well-behaved/articulate and they are asking so many questions!" followed by "they remind me of my homeschooled nieces/nephews/grandkids--you're doing a great job!" or occasionally "We homeschooled ours! The last one just graduated!" (secret homeschooler handshake) We had a couple over recently to repair the kitchen, and after day two of coming in when the kids were doing math at the dining table, the wife was like "they're homeschooled?" yeah. "Oh, that's wonderful-- we had to do that during lockdowns and it was *really hard*"-- all friendly, no judgement.
I think there are just a LOT more people now who know at least one homeschooling family or have attempted homeschooling themselves, so they've gotten over the foreign-ness of it, and there's less knee-jerk judginess about it. I can't remember the last time I encountered the "well of course your children will be socially stunted" thing from anyone but my mother-in-law ;)
Thanks for this, Scott! Quick question about the original survey - was there any way to control for responders who fit in multiple schooling categories (e.g., public school for awhile, then homeschooled)?
In my experience (which may not be generalizable), lots of homeschooling families start off sending their kids to public, get disillusioned, then try homeschooling, realize it's too hard as the kid hits the upper grades, and then fork over the money for private or religious school. This lines up with my own background as well: public school until I had a major medical condition, homeschooling during the medical condition and for a couple years after, then religious school for grades 9-12. How would a person like me get diced up in the survey? :)
> Wow! Home schooling is even more religious than religious schools!
I wonder how this correlates with age, but it doesn't surprise me. Most Catholic schools, in my experience, do an awful lot to undermine the faith -- teaching it badly, hiring teachers or ultra-heterodox nuns that vocally dissent from the faith on nearly every core belief (the real presence, abortion, contraception, the incarnation, the immaculate conception, Jesus being male, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, etc.). I go to a traditionalist parish, and a lot of families here homeschool because the religious instruction and formation is either lacking or wrong in most of the local Catholic schools.
I went to a private protestant school. I think there's also an issue with families who send their kids to religious school, but who either aren't religious themselves, or who belong to a denomination with significantly different beliefs from those endorsed by the school (in which case the religious education can actually set up internal conflict and cynicism later). Kids who don't come from a religious home are unlikely to become religious as a result of going to a church-run school.
There are no local private schools in our denomination, our church generally is very liturgically conservative and attracts traditionalists, so... our parish also has a *lot* of homeschoolers. Part of that is that the homeschool families just have more kids per family on average. IMO, it's not strictly that the really dedicated religious people homeschool because the religious schools aren't good enough. Maybe some of them would be willing to send their kids to a private school, but with more than three school-age children, the tuition costs would be staggering.
We homeschool ours for a lot of reasons, but very large among them is that we can't afford to live in a good school district OR send them to private schools. So home ed. is the best education we can give them. It *looks* like that may be reflected a bit in the survey numbers also. Wealthier people are less likely to homeschool, and way more likely to do private school, even though they are also more religious on average.
Tuition costs are a bit of a problem as well with larger families. Because of complicated reasons, I unfortunately have only have two children, but the average in my parish seems to be around 6. Almost no one at my parish send kids to public school, some send to private Catholic schools, and the majority homeschool. The local Catholic schools range from terrible to pretty good with respect to orthodoxy, religious formation and catechesis. None are stellar. My personal preference is homeschooling with attendance to community functions, so the children get opportunities to socialize. At the end of the day, no one is going to care about your kids as much as you do, and you're going to do a good job if you put in the effort, and also emphasize what is most important to you. To me, the worldly education is important, but less so than the religious education and formation.
I agree that sending kids from a secular family to even the best religious school will rarely result in the children adopting the faith; if they aren't seeing a continuity with what's happening at home, it's unlikely to stick (I'm the rare counterexample; my parents were irreligious, but sent me to Catholic school as a child because the local public school was under-performing, and I'm Catholic today in part because of it). Similarly, the kids at most parishes that are sent to their first communion and confirmation classes, whilst the parents don't practice the faith, are unlikely to stay with it after they receive their sacraments.
I don't worry about my kids' social development-- in addition to the zillion other kids they see at church (and we stay late after services just so they can run around the churchyard together), they belong to 4H, and we live in a neighborhood with tons of kids where nobody can afford to overschedule them. They have plenty of friends, and no shortage of opportunities to socialize.
We don't do much to teach religion in any formal sense. We just *are* religious, and since the kids are with us they're part of that. Give it 20 years and I can tell you if that approach worked to inculcate religion ;)
You know your kids best, as well as your current situation.
We have to make a bit more effort to socialize our kids. My parish, though close for me, is quite a bit of a drive for most of the congregation, so people tend not to live too close. Traditional Catholic parishes are few and far between (there's like 5 in my state), so the majority of people have a bit of a drive to get there, thus there sadly isn't a lot of functions during the week and such. Socializing with the kids at church on Sunday only just isn't enough, so we have to make an extra effort. One of my children is also quite shy, nerdy, and introverted, like me, and needs some extra effort to get engaged with people. And the area we live in just doesn't have a lot of kids, sadly. It's also become quite an expensive area since I purchased it, so young families with lots of kids can't really afford to live here. I'm actually hoping to move some time this year to an area where I know a lot of families with good kids of similar ages.
To publish this results without publishing standard deviations, should be embarrassing to someone who is attempting to be serious and claiming a "rationalist" moniker.
You were surprised that home schoolers are even more religious than people attending private religious school?
Maybe it's because my son is in catholic school and maybe it's because I know several people who home school their kids - but i knew this from experience.
People who don't like the libs and are vaguely religious send their kids to religious private school.
People who are super duper committed to their religion home school their kids.
Also a reasonable fraction of “religious” schools attempt to be mostly secular. I know a number of (mostly secularly raised) Jews who’s parents sent them to the local catholic school because it was perceived as the highest quality place in the area. They has a requirement for basically a religion/philosophy hybrid type class, but that was pretty much it as far as religious instruction- and it was generally well liked as an easy grade, with plenty of debate for those that liked that. I’ve anecdotally heard of similar places around the county though I don’t know what fraction of these make up private religious schools.
My son is in catholic school and has a short religion lesson daily, a prayer to start and end each day, and attends mass every Thursday morning. So at least his is very intentionally not secular.
Unschool responder here! One confounding factor is my very religious parents would have said homeschooling. I started in 6th grade because the public school was ‘too worldly’ and my small town didn’t really have other options. My mom had enthusiasm for the task at the start but that very quickly dissolved into an obsession with tennis and other personal interests. I was vaguely encouraged to read, but it was really my choice- assuming I stuck to Christian books. There was no curriculum. There were no taught lessons. She did buy me math textbooks. I devoured them and even gave myself math tests which I graded myself. I think this all says a lot more about me than it does the quality of the education. For science I was once supplied with an anti evolution trac. I don’t think it is fair to homeschoolers to call what i experienced homeschooling, but this isn’t a regulated industry. Quality varies widely and there may be less of a distinction than you are thinking. And, as for satisfaction with their education, the less satisfied homeschoolers are perhaps, like me, inclined to label it unschooling.
I don’t have much opinion in the results. SA says the sample size is small and I’m pointing out that there may be more grey area between that and homeschooling than assumed. One way would be to define, for the survey, unschooling as an intentional parenting philosophy vs as a lack of curriculum.
Aa for my own life, that’s complicated. I’ve recovered so I don’t feel it is impactful now. But that took work so I would say that it WAS impactful. At a practical level, I had no high school diploma or transcripts. I got a GED and went to community college so I could transfer into a four year college. But, on the plus side, once I was able to go, my early experience made school new and exciting which was probably helpful and i approached education as something I was supposed to figure out and explore vs expecting to be lectured about so I could memorize it — and that has definitely been helpful. Socially, I think the larger negative impacts were from the extreme religiosity vs the schooling approach, but those are a little hard to separate and I would also argument that those impacts are largely in the past either way. I have good friends and am happily married for example. College was a very socially awkward time though.
I remember reading some reddit discussions like "homeschoolers, what was best/worst about your experience", and in the negative list, many homeschoolers reported something similar -- parents starting enthusiastic about the whole project, then burning out but refusing to admit failure, so the original vision of high-quality homeschooling reduced to unschooling, or just learning one subject (the parent's favorite) and ignoring everything else.
> I don’t think it is fair to homeschoolers to call what i experienced homeschooling
If bad schools count as "schools", I think it is perfectly fair to count bad homeschooling as "homeschooling". It would be better to make a histogram to show both the best and the worst examples of homeschooling, but then of course we should do the same for schools.
This makes me (very very slightly due to not thinking these results say much of anything at all) feel better about sending my daughter to public school. Aside from things that could easily be the result of confounders, there's not enough difference here to make me think schooling type has huge implications on life outcomes, at least for folks who read this blog.
As far as I’ve read in the literature, the parental attributes (SES, highest education) trump all factors at the child level. Almost all the variance comes is fully explained by parents with everything else being Gaussian noise at the population level. If you select for more specific factors such as special needs this changes.
My impression is that many parents who decide to homeschool do so because their child is an outlier in some way and because the child was not happy in school. So I think it's hard from this data to conclude that the kind of schooling wouldn't make a big difference for your kid. Our kid did school and was homeschooled both (in an unschooling way) and his happiness difference between the two was really dramatic and entirely justified why we decided to homeschool. He did school at the beginning for a couple of years and he did a couple of years of high school, he did very well academically but hated it every time.
I guess what I'm saying in shorter version is that each individual kid's happiness and satisfaction can't be revealed by looking at these averages because within each category of schooling is a bell curve distribution of satisfaction from low to high. You move a child from one category of schooling to another and that child may move very far on the satisfaction bell curve without any of the averages changing.
This was really interesting - thankyou! As the parent of an 18 year old boy and 15 old girl, I have asked myself many of these questions - especially since the covid lock-downs. Your findings make me feel like maybe I HAVEN'T made any huge mistakes in their educations thus far.
I had some fun playing with the data; a couple general points:
- agree that you generally want to work with interaction variables of childhood SES x school type
- I would be skeptical of applying many results from the overall survey data to girls and to average/below average test scorers because the sample is so skewed
Result #1: American men age 30 or older whose childhood was "middle class" were less likely to currently describe themselves as "rich" or "upper middle class" if they were homeschooled than if they went to public school (p=0.013). Noting that the coefficient for private school was positive but insignificant (p=0.140).
Result #2: American men who had indicated their education was complete were more likely to have an advanced degree (mostly thinking of this as another way of asking "how much did you like/excel at school?" and the high SAT score of the sample and similar average across modes of education might actually be a plus here) if their childhood was one of the richer-than-middle-class categories, and less likely if their childhood was one of the poorer-than-middle-class categories. The only school type or interaction variable that was significant was children from a poorer-than-middle-class background x homeschooled being particularly less likely to have an advanced degree (p=.021). Meanwhile, while "private x poorer" and "religious x poorer" weren't statistically significant, their coefficients were positive and of greater magnitude than the negative coefficient for the poorer-than-middle-class variable alone. Given how underpowered these groups are, it supports a theory that smart kids from poor backgrounds like school better in those two environments than in public school.
Might try to think of more things to look at later.
So the comment above is based on linear regression. I probably shouldn't have added that last bit about people from poorer backgrounds in particular without checking a logistic model. I have done that now, and the statement about the relative coefficients holds, and the other results I talked about also have good sized coefficients in the corresponding direction.
For example, result #1 comes from creating a dummy variable for ClassCurrent = ["Upper middle class" or "rich"] and regressing it on dummies for private school, religious school, and homeschool (I dropped the unschooled and blank responses).
I'm an American male from a poorer-than-middle-class background, homeschooled, and have no degree at all. Which doesn't prove anything, but it's fun to corroborate something so specific! (I didn't take Scott's survey.)
Speaking for myself, my son is autistic and has ADHD; we made the large financial sacrifice to send him to private school, because he was falling apart academically and socially in middle school. You definitely need to include learning differences and social dysfunction in the questionnaire.
This too. I and two of my siblings ended up going to private religious school because my older sibling was relentlessly bullied in public school, and my parents were unable to get help from the school admin. A lot of people homeschool for similar reasons. It's frankly pretty amazing that this isn't showing up more in the stats for private and home schools (the probably higher-than-average rate of kids with learning disabilities and social/behavioral problems, who are not in public school *because* of those problems).
Calling out once again that your survey didn’t ask people where they grew up or did most of their schooling, it asked which country they most “identify with”. (Whatever that means.)
There’s likely some fraction of people who answered “United States” for the “country” question, but are immigrants who grew up somewhere else. The design of your survey makes it impossible to tell how big that group of people are and might lead to inaccuracies in generalizing about the US (or any particular country).
If you say the non-US numbers aren’t too different here, then maybe it didn’t affect this specific analysis too much, but I’d be on guard for this general class of errors.
True. There are some countries (such as Peru) where *all* schools are essentially private schools. I wonder how much of a difference this makes wrt "private school" stats.
On homeschooling and religiosity: one obvious factor:
If you are religious family, homeschooling allows you the scheduling flexibility to attend more than one church service per week-- this is a bigger thing for the more "high church" denominations that are likely to have morning services on weekdays, when most kids are in school. IIRC there is a strong correlation between number of services attended per week as a kid, and religiosity as an adult. Our own church surveys indicate that kids who only attended Sunday services (i.e. once a week) have a lousy retention rate as adults-- once a week isn't enough.
One of the supposed benefits of unschooling is that it can help people develop greater creativity. It would be interesting to look for this in the data. Is there anything in the data that could serve as a proxy for creativity?
Is this just because homeschooling was rarer (or done for different reasons, like being too poor/rural to make it to a public school) a generation ago?
...I guess I have a dataset I could use to answer this question, maybe I'll do this later.
On one hand, yes it was rarer a generation ago, but I would expect a very high intergenerational aspect. If only 0.5% were homeschooled a generation ago, I would think of those people who have kids, 80%+ would in turn homeschool their kids. So in a group that's already selected for being homeschoolers (a homeschool social group) and an environment where 3% homeschool now I'd expect at least a sixth of the kids to be second generation.
Unless there were effects such as:
* 2nd generation homeschoolers don't tap into the same social network and I missed the signal. (Possibly due to the homeschool scene growing enough to fragment.)
* People who grow up homeschooled move to a different state (although Texas is strong economically and has good homeschool laws).
* 2nd generation homeschoolers have a higher chance of not reproducing.
* The Austin metro's cost of living is too high for homeschoolers who know in advance what they are getting into.
Another thought: religious homeschoolers might be less likely to religiously homeschool their children as opposed to secular homeschoolers, and a generation ago religious homeschoolers were a large fraction of the population?
My impression is that homeschooling only opened up as an option in the U.S. in the 1960s. My generation (Gen X) is the first one that could really have been homeschooled but it was vanishingly rare. I wasn't homeschooled but my kid was (he's Gen Z). I just don't think we've had enough time.
Gen Z, sure, but what about Gen Y? We're in our late-20s to early 40s and should be having kids now. In 1999 about 1.7% of school-aged children were homeschooled (https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/homeschool/chara.asp). 1.7% of 9-12th graders as well.
Yeah I see your point. I don't know how much this is a factor... most homeschooling laws in US states anyway don't apply until a child is 7. I don't know how many Gen Y people have kids who are over 7 years old?
Don't know if it generalizes, but among the survey respondents who were both homeschooled and had kids (count = 47), here are the number of respondents for each school satisfaction rating: 10 (=6), 9 (=10), 8 (=15), 7 (=4), 6 (=2), 5 (=4), 4 (=2), 3(=3), 2 (=0), 1 (=1).
Based on this alone, 80% + choosing to home-school seems high, though not much.
I’d guess having at least one stay-at-home parent is probably a factor. Only about 1-in-3 US parent households fall into this category. I don't know how likely it is for a homeschooled parent to stay home or to have a spouse that stays home, but I'd be surprised if it were greater than 4 out of 5.
Except having a stay-at-home spouse isn't something that happens randomly. If someone wants to pursue that lifestyle they will engineer it. Whether or not greater than 4 out of 5 can engineer it or not I have no idea, and it would be interesting to find out.
But thanks for pulling the numbers on the respondents. I do know one person who was homeschooled for some years growing up and did not think it was good who is strongly considering homeschooling her child, so I imagine it works the other way around as well.
I mentioned elsewhere that I found some data on the number of homeschoolers in 1999, and that they counted for 1.7% of school-aged children, and 9th-12th graders were also 1.7% homeschooled. Only about 80% were full-time homeschooled, but that's still a lot larger number than my off-the-cuff 0.5% mentioned above. And either way it still seems strange that out of 20-30 families in the social groups we interact with only a single parent has that background (and others often remark that they also don't know any 2nd generations).
Actually, I've been thinking that this is one of the stronger arguments against homeschooling: if those who were afforded it don't think it's important enough to pass it down, then that is evidence that it isn't that great.
Do you keep in touch with any of the other homeschoolers you knew as a child, or know if they have families and how they're educating their children?
I was homeschooled, and don't keep in touch or know what happened to most of the kids I grew up with. I follow one on social media; she had a terrible experience and went no-contact with her parents. One became a missionary, and homeschooled her children while away in a non-English speaking country. One sent a message about getting out of jail and changing genders a year or so ago. One is a single mother. One married twice, and has a child who recently started kindergarten. The rest have disappeared from my radar some time ago, so I don't know what became of them. I can't really generate a good picture here, but would be interested to hear from someone who could.
I don't have plans to homeschool my own children, though I'm open to it as a possibility at some point. My family is characterized by high openness and low agreeableness and conscientiousness. We drive one another crazy when we're cooped up together, and look forward to the day our three year old is ready to start preschool. She is very, very energetic and hyper, and needs more structure than I'm likely to give her. My mother visited a few weeks ago, and was trying to teach daughter to read. When we kids were grown, she went on to teach lower elementary at a public school. I think she just likes teaching -- and, especially, is suited to teaching lower elementary. I also teach, but not reading or arithmetic, and don't want to. It's possible the composition will change as former homeschoolers' children mature, but also that they have/will have different support structures in place, since it seemed like homeschool groups are most relevant in lower elementary. After 10 or so we pretty exclusively participated in (a homeschooler heavy) 4-H group and church youth group.
Several families at my church do intend to homeschool their children, or have started doing so, one of whom was homeschooled herself. This seems to be an aesthetic and ideological choice, without much investment in academic subject matter. They'll probably be better off if they can form a small religious school together, but nobody yet has the organizational skills or financing for that. I'm interested to see how it goes.
I lost all contact with my peers when I/they moved to college (not on social media). My parents (I believe) lost most contact when they moved to another state (not very sociable people). So I really have no clue when it comes to outcomes other than my own.
Regarding the high religiosity of home-schooled subscribers, this should not be surprise, because the home-schooling movement was strongly pushed by fundamentalist Christians.
The following story is worth approximately 0¢, statistically, but I find it amusing, so I'll tell it anyway. The son of a friend of mine was kicked out of HS for being a disruptive cut-up. He also committed pranks verging on the criminal toward a teacher he hated. He was taken to court and the settlement required the family to go to counseling for 6 months. My friend thought this was a draconian sentence, but afterwards, when I asked him how it went, he said that actually, it went well. One outcome was that his son, an artist who stayed up till 4am painting, should be home-schooled. His parents (who are ardent atheists, though they love to do a traditional Xmas, in which all the tree ornaments are hand-made by the family), let their son live on whatever schedule he liked, but they did give him assignments in the required state subjects. He applied to a very prestigious art academy and got 800s on his SATs. He was admitted and got to every class on time, whereas many of his fellow students stayed up all night and didn't necessarily go to class. I asked him about that and he said something like "Well, I already did that, but now I'm at a place I love, doing what I love."
I think your point about home schooling being associated with conservative Christian culture is correct and would explain greater religiosity if you polled the country, but it's harder to know if that explains what is going on in this survey because the numbers are incredibly skewed towards non-theism compared to the general population. The sample is so unrepresentative that it wouldn't be obvious that it's reflecting the reason for the general patterns you see in America or if there's some other niche explanation for this subpopulation extremely skewed towards nonbelief.
I agree with that, but since the sample population is skewed toward non-theism (as you said), my guess is that the religiosity of the home-schooled would be even larger in the general population. Of course, I used the word "guess" pointedly. ;-)
I noticed that some respondents put in their full SAT scores (e.g. 1550) instead of the subsection scores when answering the survey. How did you exclude these when taking the average scores for the verbal and math questions?
I could see how respondents who took it between 2005 and 2016 might have summed their Reading and Writing scores. But it looks like ten respondents said their math sub-score was 1600 too.
Thanks. Once excluding >800 and <100 (maybe some people put in their ACT scores?) I got numbers very close to Scott's. I'm guessing he did something similar and the differences are due to my using the publicly available dataset.
I am not sure the difference between home schooling vs. unschooling is robust - i.e. that people
who studied at home interpreted the question uniformly enough to answer one or the other according to the same criteria. In other words, two people who received the same home education may have given different answers to this one. How do you account for that?
It would be worth running some of these controlling for social class. For instance, none of the rich either home schooled or unschooled and none of the upper class unschooled, so if richer people are more satisfied with life or more likely to be married or ... that could make home schooled and unschooled look worse on those measures even if, controlling for social cost, they were better.
Weird. Doesn't do that for me. You're hitting the radio button under the header "Notifications" and the option:
Posts
Receive emails for new posts
Maybe the difference is I'm a paid subscriber and you aren't? Yes, that looks to be exactly it, I tried that on a substack that I am not a paid subscriber to and it does appear to have removed that one from my subscribe list, in spite of the fact that I didn't hit the big honking "unsubscribe" button.
Sounds like it's a poor Substack feature implementation.
I wonder what results you would get if you dis-aggregated public schools based on whether the school was a magnet school, or some other measure of school quality.
I was told by a psych PhD who studies giftedness that this school is easily the best school available for profoundly gifted kids: https://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/ They call themselves a public school, but they hardly seem like a typical public school (e.g. "Our accredited classes group students by ability rather than age", "Our unique approach to learning has attracted families from across the country and globe")
Hey @Scott, I was confused about one thing in the Survey. I'm retired, which I said early on. But then, much later, you asked things about "working" It wasn't clear to me whether I should answer that or not, and I I think I did answer.
Though retired, I do things that I consider "work", but not for remuneration. For example, one year, I was Treasurer for a non-profit org, and that was definitely work. But I also have some individual projects that I work on.
So I wish you had defined work more explicitly; For example, "activities associated with a job for which you are paid", if that's the definition you meant, whjch would have led me to pass up the question I referred to above.
Were the SAT averages calculated using corrections for the time period they were presumably taken, at least to address the major shifts? If so, what equivalence tables were used?
I tried to reproduce Scott's numbers and saw the following:
Reading
Public: 743 -> 741
Home: 756 -> 756
Religious: 751 -> 748
Private: 758 -> 758
Unschooling: 758 -> 758
Math
Public: 743 -> 739
Home: 722 -> 722
Religious: 727 -> 725
Private: 757 -> 754
Unschooling: 688 -> 688
I removed the data that listed scores higher than 800 or lower than 100. I made no correction for different tests.
About 13% of respondents listed ages 50 or higher, which is (I think) rounded to the nearest decade. The major renorming happened in 1995, so probably at least 1/8th of the scores should be corrected.
This seems like it adds up to weak argument for sending your kids to public school. All the effects are basically negligible, private school is expensive, and homeschooling is a ton of work.
My barely middle-class family scraped enough cash together to keep us in Catholic schools in the 1950s. We weren't particularly religious, but for some reason our folks decided parochial schools were better. The nuns were effective and exacting, and that ten years of education was one of the greatest gifts our parents gave us. (Serious religious women ran the schools; priests or brothers were rarely seen.) We didn't know what 'diversity', 'inclusion', or 'integration' was; classes were always a broad mix of 'races' or cultures with a smattering of Protestants, Jews, or nonreligious students.
Some non-denominational, evangelical schools seem to have adopted the more rigorous academic aspects of the old Catholic schools, but infused them with the more populist doctrines of American evangelical Christianity and appear to be doing quite well. But they are expensive, certainly unavailable to most households making less than six figures.
Yet, regardless of current arguments regarding rigor, regardless of attempts to inject white guilt and gender ideology into curricula, our town still has an Immaculate Conception School still run by nuns still proud to send most of its graduates to college.
Yes, one thing both my sister and I agree on is that being taught in a single-sex school by nuns didn't leave us with any feelings of "a woman's place is in the home" or "the husband is the head of the wife". We were expected to work hard in school, study, and that women could achieve as much as anyone. And this wasn't in the days of the new-style religious orders; while they did adapt to Vatican II reforms (e.g. in the habits), they still wore habits (they have abandoned them since, but that was years after I left school) and were orthodox in teaching the faith (although they did also adopt the new religion class textbooks of the 70s just when I was going into secondary school which dropped all the stuff about learning the dogma and instead went for the 'niceness is nice' and social justice angle, this is why I say I get all my theology out of Dante because the last actual catechism I learned out of was in 6th class when I was eleven).
I meant to write 'Immaculate Heart' School, but got waylaid by the pop culture meme of male pregnancy. But if pregnant men ever start their own school, I'll give them 'Immaculate Conception'.
This actually remarkable how much a difference schooling makes. Surely somewhere between 60 and 70% of public school people (far more than 8%) were raised with a household religious belief, yet for public school belief waned to 8.4%. Compare to home and religious school where one gets much better "retention" as it were. This seems very important for thinking about things like ideology in schools and whether it matters. In the religious context it does. Contra Caplan et al. I'd surprised if ideology in schools didn't matter.
The thing there is that this is not a survey of the general public, it's a survey of SSC/ACX readers. That will naturally tilt secular/agnostic/atheist even if all of us had been raised by Mowgli's wolf pack co-parenting with Tarzan's ape foster parents.
Degree of commitment to religious belief by parents also plays a part; if your family is 'culturally X' or 'vaguely Y' then it makes more of a difference between 'I drifted away from the last fraying tether of a religious identity' and 'my family practiced their faith and still don't quite understand why I gave it all up'.
The results indicate a strong positive for public schools because many of the factors associated with poor outcomes end up relegated to the public school group: working single mothers, messy divorces, financial insecurity, children raised by foster parents, parents who don't think much about education.
Meanwhile anyone who homeschools their kids is by definition putting enormous resources and effort into their children's education. The homeschool group will be composed of stable two parent households who are making huge sacrifices in order to do what they think is best for their children. Of course private school families are dumping a lot of money into education, so they have means and value their kids' learning.
The homeschool and unschool groups include a lot of parents who took their children out of school because their children were bullied or had mental health problems or otherwise weren’t coping with school.
That's true, but the public school group also includes all kids who were bullied or had learning needs and their parents did not have the means or motivation to pull them out of school and create a personalized learning environment.
Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles, would like to offer itself as a peer-reviewed publishing platform for any analyses using the ACX reader survey data. Visit the website (theseedsofscience.org to learn more or contact us at info@theseedsofscience.org.
The unschooling results make sense to me; a decent proportion of the unschooling families I've known over the years appear to have opted for unschooling simply as a term to justify their severe educational neglect of their kids, often accompanied by other types of neglect as well.
Sorting that out from people who have ideological convictions about unschooling and do provide learning opportunities to their kids consistent w/the kids interests and needs would be complicatey.
My three children all unschool. It’s a second generation thing for them. I went to school till fifth-grade, homeschooled with a curriculum in sixth-grade, then unschooled after that.
Unschooling for me is definitely a way of life, and one that puts us far outside the societal norm. We’ve made seven moves since we’ve had kids, three times across state-lines, and not having to worry about “finding a good school” is a tremendous advantage to mobility. Even on a day-to-day basis, not having the rhythms of our family life determined by school schedules gives tremendous freedom to engage in the world. It’s very easy to go see a super-bloom, stay up late to look at the stars, take time when grandparents visit, or whatever else.
Our kids all take their education seriously. For what would be high-school, our oldest daughter volunteered in a university lab as a worker. She helped on several projects, ran equipment, performed bench work, and was even named as (an admittedly minor) co-author on a published paper. She’s now a sophomore at a UC school and began working in a lab her first term of college. Our two younger have been at least as aggressive in their own chosen domains.
While we definitely let the kids follow their own interests, we do insist on basic literacy and numeracy. While it hasn’t been a problem for us, were our kids not to be able to read or multiply and divide I’m sure we would have insisted they learn. But as I said, it just wasn’t an issue. My position on this is probably guided by my own family experience. My father has a B.S. in math and never uses it. My brother, who also unschooled, got into college not knowing much more than the most basic pre-algebra. But there, he fell in love with math, got a B.S. in math, and uses higher math on a daily basis.
While we mostly let our kids follow their interests, we do not desert them to figure things out themselves. And sometimes we do push them in certain directions. For instance my 11yo son wants to be an engineer and he’s making games in Unity. Earlier this month, and over his objections, I insisted he start using Co-pilot or Ghostwriter.
As i said in the beginning, our way of life puts us far outside the norm in ways that can be dangerous. For instance, about a decade ago, when we moved to a new state, we put the kids in school as an experiment. My wife had found a small horse-farm on the edge of town, and the kids were volunteering there a couple days a week to learn to care for the animals. We’d also take days to explore the new town, hike, visit museums etc., without too much regard to the school schedule. Within less than a month we got a call from the school asking about our kids unexcused absences. We explained the absences were perfectly fine, and that the public school was just one of several experiences we were affording our children, that we weren’t concerned with grades or any particular curriculum. The school told us if we had a handful more absences (I believe it was three) they’d need to call child protective services. We, of course, pulled the kids from school immediately to avoid the danger.
The point is, our natural way of living can very easily lead to severe consequences. For that reason, attending community college or college is important for the kids. Not so much for the actual content of the classes, but for the training in how to navigate and avoid conflict with the bureaucracies of our society.
People are frequently concerned about the social costs of homeschooling or unschooling. Certainly, it is more difficult as a non-schooler to meet kids your own age. And most of those kids, being schoolers, have their lives and realities dominated by a bureaucracy that is entirely alien to the non-schooler. On the other hand, the schooled environment is traumatic for many. And, as a non-schooler, i feel there is something abusive in sorting children into tightly-bound age cohorts, forcing them to sit still in rows of desks all day, at the mercy of an authority figure they’ve had no part in choosing, and to whom they must petition for even the right to use the bathroom.
But even if I were to accept for the sake of argument that the schooled environment is a healthy one for socialization, between sports, online communities, and homeschool groups, there are plenty of opportunities to socialize. The main social problem I see is finding romantic partners of the appropriate age. There’s really no good way to reliably meet your high-school aged crushes or boyfriend(s) as a non-schooler. So that mostly has to wait till college or the workplace.
That said I did have one girlfriend when high-school aged, don’t feel in retrospect I had more than the normal amount of awkwardness in my brief career of college dating, and ended up meeting my wife in my junior year. And, as a mid-forties man, I don’t feel the lack of socialization in public school kept me from developing personal friends or professional relationships.
A final thought on “unschoolers have low self-reported life-satisfaction.” Putting aside the small sample size and overall tightness of the reported values, I doubt the question compares apples-to-apples. Life satisfaction is essentially a measure of existential angst, and the unschooler’s existential angst is very different from the schooler’s. The unschooler is always forced to figure out for themselves what they want from life, whereas the schooler can allow themselves to be led by their peers, the system, or authorities. And so, especially at the younger ages answering the survey, it seems to me the schooled may be more likely to feel satisfied with their life because of external affirmations - graduating college, having a job, etc. Whereas the unschooler is more likely to judge their progress by their own standards. These seem like different enough yardsticks to me that we cannot reliably compare the readings between the two.
And a final finally, lest I’ve seemed to hate on public education or educators, I certainly recognize the tremendous social benefit the public school system offers in its breakfast and lunch programs. Many otherwise abandoned children obtain their only physical and emotional sustenance from the adults running their schools. Unschooling worked well for me and mine, but I really won’t confidently generalize its utility for children who are not natively curious, or lack parents who are devotedly solicitous of their care.
Many of these comparisons scream for a regression, instead of other adjustments. I feel bad saying this when I don't have time to run them myself and publish the results, but just noting it would make things more reliable and easier to communicate.
Also, should turn some of these tables (especially the 2d ones) into charts.
Private schooling appears to be associated with better outcomes but also with being from a richer household. Would you consider splitting out the results of upper-middle and rich to see if the benefits of private still hold?
The point of this kind of analysis is either to find some blindingly obviously large effect or to conclude that there is no such effect. Trying to do subgroup analysis on vague terms like upper-middle class vs. rich seems pretty useless in this context.
It's not a vague term - it's something captured in the survey. The point was to not to analyze between rich and upper middle class but to remove the confounder of household wealth or class from choice of private vs public schooling - thus "and". I thought that was obvious. I don't think its useless if we are interested in the impact of school choice on outcomes.
Hmmmm if I were to homeschool my future kids, one of the primary motivations would be so they wouldn't be brainwashed into being trans... But this shows that that homeschooled kids are the most likely to go trans
Makes me think twice about it
Almost like the things you think "brainwash" people into being trans are totally not the reason people become trans.
You don't think rapid onset gender dysphoria exists as a result of social pressure?
Not him, but of course not.
Definitely not
Yes. Esp for girls.
No. "Using a national sample of United States adolescents, we found that there were more TGD (transgender and gender diverse) AMAB adolescents than TGD AFAB adolescents in both 2017 and 2019. Additionally, the total percentage of TGD adolescents in our sample decreased from 2.4% in 2017 to 1.6% in 2019. This decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as TGD is incongruent with an ROGD hypothesis that posits social contagion."
From this article: https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/3/e2022056567/188709/Sex-Assigned-at-Birth-Ratio-Among-Transgender-and
Jesse Singal argued (persuasively, in my view) that the results of this study do not remotely imply what the authors claim: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-new-study-on-rapid-onset-gender
Thanks for sharing that! Sometimes a critical point can be lost in a sea of comments. And even if people see and appreciate a point, the poster is unlikely to know here, bereft of a 'like' or 'upvote' signal.
Thanks for the link, I should have read the study more carefully before posting it! It's disappointing that something so apparently poorly put together could pass peer review (yes I know, it's very flawed, but even so). That said, the original ROGD paper sounds worse.
Try another one, with a smaller clinical population, and a different definition of rapid-onset gender dysphoria: "a phenomenon in youth with gender dysphoria emerging at or after puberty, socially influenced through peer contagion, and with contributing factors including poor mental health, neurodevelopmental disabilities, parent-child conflict, and maladaptive coping strategies" - not based on which gender and sex was involved. They asked the question whether a more recent realisation of a trans identity in adolescents was associated with "self-reported mental health measures, mental health and neurodevelopmental disability diagnoses, behaviors consistent with maladaptive coping (eg, self-harm), support from online and/or transgender friends but not parents, and lesser gender dysphoria." They did not find support for these associations in a clinical population. The research was carried out by people from the Trans Youth CAN! research team, so there is obviously potential for bias there. https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(21)01085-4/fulltext
At a cursory glance, that study looks a lot more robust than Turban's.
"Additionally, the total percentage of TGD adolescents in our sample decreased from 2.4% in 2017 to 1.6% in 2019. "
So the number of TGD adolescents decreased by a *third* in two years, and this is evidence *against* TGD being a social fad?
My thought exactly!
While the majority of transgender people have been male-to-female, the recent trend seems to be an increase in female-to-male.
Why this is so, is what is being argued over. Why are girls and young women deciding they would be better off as men?
Probably because historically MTFs got more exposure, but now that FTMs are getting exposure, people with relatively mild dysphoria are more likely to realize that transitioning is an option.
Because nobody is more fad-prone than adolescent girls.
If it's a fad, then why don't most of them lose interest and desist after a few years, like they lose interest in any other fad?
There is literally no evidence that rapid onset gender dysphoria exists. The only study that purports to show it is Lisa Littman's study, which posted surveys on ROGD websites to ask parents about their kids' ROGD. There are two glaring flaws with that study, either of which alone would completely invalidate it. First, it's a study about the inner lives of adolescents and young adults that's based entirely on the reports of parents, a demographic that's notoriously clueless about the inner lives of adolescents and young adults. Second, Littman's sample consisted entirely of people on ROGD websites, so of course they said it existed! This is a bit like trying to determine the shape of the Earth by posting a survey on the Flat Earth Society Forums.
Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
>This is a bit like trying to determine the shape of the Earth by posting a survey on the Flat Earth Society Forums.
Supposing someone posted a survey on a pro-trans website asking "do you believe transgenderism exists?" I suspect most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative. Do you think the act of me posting the survey on a pro-trans website invalidates the results of the survey? (Per Scott, this is called "proving too much" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/)
The difference between this question and the flat Earth question (which seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but here we are) is that the shape of the Earth can be directly observed: 99% of the population believing the earth was flat wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to its actual shape. Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
So no, the ROGD question isn't remotely like the flat Earth question.
>Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
Nobody is qualified to offer informed speculation about a person's inner life besides the person in question, and that includes the person's parents. So Littman should have talked to people who supposedly have ROGD, but she never talked to one.
>Supposing someone posted a survey on a pro-trans website asking "do you believe transgenderism exists?" I suspect most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative.
The difference is that transgender people have direct access to their own inner lives.
>The difference between this question and the flat Earth question (which seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but here we are) is that the shape of the Earth can be directly observed: 99% of the population believing the earth was flat wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to its actual shape. Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
Sure, if the person's behavior includes answering questions about their inner life! If you were trying to determine the shape of the Earth, you would actually study the Earth instead of asking people about it, and if you were trying to determine if ROGD exists, you would hopefully talk to people who supposedly have it instead of asking their parents.
99% of people not believing in gender dysphoria wouldn't make it any less real to the people who have it. So if you want to learn about a person's inner experiences, you should ask that person.
>Nobody is qualified to offer informed speculation about a person's inner life besides the person in question
Do you think people can ever be honestly mistaken about their inner experiences? I certainly do. In such cases, we may need to instead substitute testimony from an individual close to that person, who knows them very well and cares about their welfare.
Even if you think that survey responses from the individuals in question is the gold standard, that doesn't imply that survey responses from the individuals' parents are *completely* worthless. They could well be the next best thing.
Besides, several of the questions on Littman's survey had nothing to do with the inner experiences of the teenagers in question and were simple factual questions like "has your child been diagnosed with a developmental disorder or mental illness?" or "did your child express a non-heterosexual sexual orientation prior to coming out as trans?" If you think parents aren't qualified to answer the question of whether their child has ever been diagnosed with autism or depression, I don't know what to tell you.
>So Littman should have talked to people who supposedly have ROGD, but she never talked to one.
I know this isn't quite the same thing, but do you accept the self-reported inner experiences of desistors and detransitioners who assert things like "At one point I sincerely believed I was transgender, but now believe I was mistaken" or "At one point I was suffering from gender dysphoria, but no longer am"?
>The difference is that transgender people have direct access to their own inner lives.
I didn't say "most of the respondents (who are themselves transgender) would answer in the affirmative". I said "most of the respondents would answer in the affirmative", without specifying the respondents' gender identity.
Put it another way: if Littman had posted her survey on a website for the parents of trans children, and a majority of the respondents (who are themselves cisgender) said they sincerely believed that their child was transgender, would your response be "that's ridiculous, no one can know whether someone is really transgender except the person themselves"? Somehow I doubt it; I suspect that instead you'd be praising the parents for uncritically "affirming" their children's stated gender identity. You're dismissing this survey, not on the basis of its methodology, but because it didn't give you the answer you wanted.
>Besides the young adult or adolescent themselves, who do you think would be better placed to offer informed speculation about their inner life than the young adult's parent?
Most people in their peer group? I mean, sure, *some* parents are in tune with their kids' lives, but most parents are pretty clueless as to their kids actual lives. Take drug use, something we have good data on[1]:
>One in 10 parents surveyed believed their own teenage child had used alcohol during the previous year. And just one in 20 believed their teen had smoked marijuana.
>Teens themselves reported a much higher rate of substance use in a separate poll released late last year. About half of 10th-graders said they had used alcohol over the previous 12 months; about one in 4 (28%) reported marijuana use.
Off by a factor of five in both cases. And this is something that should have physical, observable effects. And it's not like parents have low priors on substance use:
>More than half of the parents polled in the latest survey believed general alcohol use among teens -- other than their children -- was higher than reflected in the earlier poll and about a third overestimated marijuana use among other teens.
Parents, in general, are in pretty heavy denial that there's anything "wrong" with their kids, and have a poor understanding of the reality their adolescent children's live. Hell, I can't tell you the number of depressed adolescents and teens I knew (some of whom were ideating suicide) whose parents were totally oblivious or even actively in denial.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20110915/parents-view-of-teen-drug-use-your-kid-not-mine
It's a fair point, but I might also point out that we shouldn't automatically take kids' word for it either. Teenagers may falsely claim to have used alcohol or drugs in hopes of seeming cool. This was illustrated by the "video nasties" scandal in the UK, in which many schoolchildren earnestly claimed to have seen horror films which *didn't exist*. Even speaking anecdotally, I'm sure everyone had a classmate in secondary school prone to telling tall tales about how sexually active they were.
> Gender dysphoria (and by extension ROGD) is a psychological question. A person's inner experiences are by definition unknowable to outside observers: outside observers can only speculate and draw inferences about the person's inner expreiences based on the person's behaviour.
The experience itself isn't even very informative. One cannot actually differentiate from a first person perspective the difference between the qualia of "I am actually experiencing the qualia of the opposite sex" and "I mistakenly think I am experience the qualia of the opposite sex". The best that can be done is guesswork. It's very hard for me to imagine this guess would not be heavily influenced by social environment. I'm not even convinced gender as felt phenomenon is coherent outside of a social framework.
>I'm not even convinced gender as felt phenomenon is coherent outside of a social framework.
I disagree - some trans men report phantom penises, similar to amputees' phantom limbs, and that certainly doesn't seem like something that would arise from a social framework - but even if that's true, gender is a felt phenomenon that has a huge effect on some people's quality of life. If someone really wants to have breasts for some reason and is miserable without them, then I don't care why.
I absolutely had ROGD from ages 23-26 or so, and subsequently grew out of it. I was depressed and self-hating, had a lot of trans friends/trans ideology exposure, and began to believe I was a trans man. Fortunately I did not take T (though I wanted to, desperately, for a while). After some deep introspection I realized that my depression was making the idea of becoming a new person an all-consuming obsession. I got some therapy, found a boyfriend and realized I really liked vanilla heterosexual sex, and my gender dysphoria basically went away.
So ROGD definitely *exists.* The question is to what degree.
I think you should be careful with claims that there is "literally no evidence" for some controversial proposition. In the Bayesian sense, even the mere fact that there is a term called ROGD is evidence that it exists.
Maybe so. But it's not strong evidence.
Obviously, there is a big expansion in the number of adolescent girls suddenly declaring themselves to be boys or nonbinary or whatever, since roughly that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2015. There are countless sources of evidence that this is a huge fad. Some of them were always tomboys, but a lot had been normal girly girls, which is a new social construct.
>Obviously, there is a big expansion in the number of adolescent girls suddenly declaring themselves to be boys or nonbinary or whatever, since roughly that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2015.
Historically MTFs got more exposure than FTMs, and thus biological males were more likely to realize transitioning was an option than females. Now FTMs are getting more exposure, so the number of trans men in America is almost as high as the number of trans women. That's not evidence that it's a fad - transgender rates for both men and women have been steadily increasing since the mid-1900s and show no sign of going down.
If by "that character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians" you mean Caitlyn Jenner, she's a trans woman, so why would girls transition to male just to imitate her?
>There are countless sources of evidence that this is a huge fad.
Like what?
>Some of them were always tomboys, but a lot had been normal girly girls, which is a new social construct.
Seemingly manly men have been suddenly coming out as trans women for decades - Jenner is an excellent example. This is simply the opposite sex version of that. Trans men have gotten less exposure in previous decades than trans women, so of course less stereotypical trans men got even less exposure.
I think young people are VERY susceptible to social pressures - and imaginative too!
It's very clear among my nieces' social group that gender diversity is the ultimate trendy thing. I get the impression of it being like having a favourite colour. It sounds like 2/3rds of the girls are 'non-straight'
Exactly. Data and studies are weak evidence compared to what we see with our dear young relatives and friends.
You don't really get that much of a say in your kid's gender expression, sexuality, etc. Even if some styles of raising them, or some environments, might make them more likely to repress themselves and stay in the closet forever, any effect there will be marginal, and mostly evaporate once they leave the nest.
What you have much more of a say in is whether they'll still talk to you after discovering who they are.
If you raise your child to believe men can become women, then yes, you are massively influencing their gender expression and sexuality.
Well, if a person really wants to be X, even though the path is hard and inconvinient just from the mere fact that they can be X in principle, then the conventional wisdom is that the person already had a strong disposition towards wanting to be X.
Do you believe that majority of boys have a strong disposition towards wanting to be women (and vice versa) so that they need to be kept in dark about the possibility?
I would put it more like some nonzero % of people go through some very difficult times around gender and fitting in as teens and it is a bad idea to present them with life long altering options during this period as a method of coping. On top of that some non-zero % of people just like to do whatever will piss off the "squares" as much as possible, and right now this is sort of the last redoubt. Coming home with piercings or tattoos won't do it anymore.
I absolutely think there are non-negligible social costs to the phenomenon and that for most (though not all) transitioning is probably an aggregate negative decision in terms of life satisfaction if you removed all the social pressure there is to lie about such things and the rationalizing people do after making non-reversable changes.
> I would put it more like some nonzero % of people go through some very difficult times around gender and fitting in as teens
Trivially true. And some of these people are trans, while others have other reasons for not fitting in.
> it is a bad idea to present them with life long altering options during this period
Going trough default puberty is life long altering option. Modern trans activists would really want an option for the people who don't want it not to do it.
> On top of that some non-zero % of people just like to do whatever will piss off the "squares"
I'd like to see some evidence that this contributes to gender transitions in any way before seriously entertaining this idea.
> I absolutely think there are non-negligible social costs to the phenomenon
This cuts both ways. Modern pressure not to change your gender is still much much higher than to change it. As long as absolute majority of transitions successfully improve the QOL and the rate of false positives is tiny we seem to be on the right track.
I'm definitely not the only trans person whose familial reception to coming out was something like "why couldn't you have been merely gay instead, we could have handled that just fine!" Many Such Cases.
Of course, for those who already didn't like their family much to begin with, this reaction has something of the opposite intended effect. I wouldn't say it was a __primary motivation__ or anything - lotsa other easier ways to spite one's face - but it's definitely in the Pro rather than Con column. Being that-which-is-detested-at-some-fundamental-level is an excellent excuse to keep unwanted blood relations at a safe arm's length...for their own benefit as much as mine.
Counterpoint in fairness: this also deters me to some degree from detransitioning, which I entertain from time to time. I __really__ don't want to give The Haters the satisfaction of being proven right. There's some real Pride at stake in assembling a functional life versus a largely-indifferent-or-hostile world, even if it's an unhappy one...sunk cost fallacy is a big thing, even outside monetary decisions. (I'm more wary of claiming generalization here, since I was never "very trans" to begin with.)
So in conclusion, the opinions of "squares" do have some non-negligible degree of influence. And this seems uncontroversial with reversed sign, that external disapproval is a common cause of detransitoning.
That gender can be altered is just a fact. If I tell my child about gravity does that prevent her from being able to fly? Parents are in particular control of these natural processes.
We are going to have to agree to disagree on whether men can become women
Depends on how you define "men" and "women." What is a fact is that most secondary sex characteristics can be altered with hormones, and primary sex characteristics can be altered with surgery. That leaves only internal sex organs, which don't always work even in people who aren't transgender, and chromosomes, which no one's going to know about without a DNA test.
I define it as XX vs XY chromosome.
Exceptions can be made for the 0.001% of the population that is a hermaphrodite or has a weird chromosome condition
Look. We can taboo the phrase "becoming women" if you like, and it'll still Just Be A Fact that men can go through a series of social, and optionally surgical, processes whereby which they'll look more like women, and a vast section of the population will agree to treat them as though they were women. That's a choice that they can make.
I don't doubt the sincerity of your insistence on defining "man" and "woman" based on chromosomes — but I don't think it's actually the root of your discomfort with transgenderism, and I think it's needless obfuscation to come back to it as though it were the core of the issue. Or would everything be fine and dandy for you if everything else about the transition process were the same, except that ""trans women"" now acknowledged, if asked, that of *course* they were technically men?
If you're uncomfortable with the thought of a child of yours undergoing hormone therapy and extensive surgery that aren't necessary for their physical health — well, just say that. It may or may not be "correct", but it's an obviously valid and respectable feeling for a (prospective) parent to experience. Being a stickler for chromosomes is really neither here nor there, and just makes you come across as pedantic instead of sincerely concerned.
(You might also be uncomfortable with the mere thought of a son of yours wearing dresses and lipstick and speaking in a high-pitched voice, surgery or no surgery. And while I think taking those feelings as reflective of some grand moral truth would be heavily misguided — they're *still* more obviously heartfelt and natural and sympathetic than chromosomal pedantry!)
"it'll still Just Be A Fact that men can go through a series of social, and optionally surgical, processes whereby which they'll look more like women, and a vast section of the population will agree to treat them as though they were women"
I do not agree to treat them as though they were women, because they are not women. The vast majority of people in the world today agree with my opinion. Would you agree to treat me like a chimpanzee just because I dress like a chimpanzee, eat like a chimpanzee, and convinced a plastic surgeon to mutilate my body to be more like a chimpanzee's? If I insisted that I'm a real chimpanzee and that I'd be offended at any suggestion otherwise, wouldn't you think I was either delusional, mocking you, or insulting your intelligence? If there was a sudden spike in the number of people identifying as chimpanzee and mutilating themselves accordingly, wouldn't you see it as a contagious mental illness that needs to be stopped, not a praiseworthy movement to be encouraged?
Define 'gender' please. It seems like a most nebulous concept to me.
Seriously: Second comment here saying the same thing. Raising them to believe anything is not going to work if they are the sort of person who questions what they are told. It just won't.
Unfortunately you are just going to need to hope that your kid turns out well, and you are might need to accept that what 'turning out well' means to them might not be what you had in mind.
It would be strange if this were true since parenting can lastingly effect most forms of behaviour. Of course it can't effect genetics, but I think it's well established that sexuality isn't genetic. I haven't seen anything on whether trans has a genetic component (maybe everyone trying to study it got beaten up by at least one of the trans and anti-trans lobbies).
Is there data you've seen to the contrary?
Sexuality isn't genetic?! Not 100% sure but:
Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, but they theorize that it is the result of a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences.[1][3][4] They do not view sexual orientation as a choice.[1][3][5]
Quoting ENWP on culture war issues is a good way to start a fight and a poor way to win anyone over; the facts that most conservative media are "deprecated", alt-rightists are actively purged (WP:No Nazis is *technically* not policy, but it might as well be since they ban on the basis of it) and tradcons are not-very-online do tend to tell.
This doesn't make the statement false, but seriously, if you want to convince anti-SJers of something, using WP won't work. We see it as hopelessly compromised on CW issues (actually, most of us see it as hopelessly compromised in general; I have to remind people quite frequently that *outside* CW issues it's great).
All psychological traits are influenced by genes and environment. All traits are heritable but not 100%. These are some of the most well-replicated findings of behavioral genetics.
Sexuality and transgenderism are influenced by genes and environment.
I am not sure which behavior you’re thinking of but parental influence on behavior later in life is typically overestimated.
I just looked at a review paper one day (but now can't find it) that said the best evidence we have suggests that gender dysphoria develops in the mother's womb. In this case parenting of course can't affect much. If someone can find the paper, please let us know.
Anyway, even if it starts before birth, there are two sides of the coin: a) many kids with GD "grow out of it" later and decide that they don't want to change sex after all, and later they are more happy with life than their peers who did change. And b) kids with strong GD are utterly miserable and make horrible numbers of suicide attempts. These kids get happier and stop trying to kill themselves if they get to change sex. So here we have a difficult and tragic situation: if we let them all easily transfer we'll cause some of them live less satisfying lives later. And if we conceal that possibility from them, we'll have a number of them suffer horrible misery and lose some lives. So of course the correct action is not "never let your kids know that transitioning is possible" and also not "let them easily transition at their whim". The correct way is a difficult process of making sure if they are really suffering horribly and only then letting them change; and this of course gives a lot of false positives and false negatives and we'll still lose a lot of them. I hope AI diagnostics will some day save us from this.
The 'suicide' argument is pretty spurious. GD isn't an isolated disorder, it is accompanied by depression, anxiety and other highly negative mental problems. Disambiguating the effects of those from GD is a non-starter.
But what's your plan then? Most of the suiciders are probably on antidepressants already. If their anxiety and depression are related to their GD then how would you treat their mood without dealing with GD? I'm assuming that you don t consider all GD to be a secondary result of other mood problems. What's the plan?
The intervention for GD used to be 'wait and see' since 90% of sufferers recover naturally by their early 20's. It is only in the last decade that a medication-first approach has been introduced with baleful, lifelong consequences for many sufferers. This is why the UK NHS and other European health services are now reverting back to the traditional treatment.
> I hope AI diagnostics will some day save us from this.
I should imagine that by the time A.I. was good enough to do that reliably, we'd also be in enough of a technological utopia that transitioning back and forth would cease to be an issue, i.e. you could flawlessly transition and detransition more or less at will.
Is there much evidence that parenting actually lastingly affects any form of behavior? As I recall, many things that people expect are the result of parenting actually have a large genetic component, while peer environment has more effect on behavior than parenting.
"What you have much more of a say in is whether they'll still talk to you after discovering who they are"
I see this sanctimonious little messaging in a lot of places, and it always irritates me. Usually because the person posting it would have a completely different reaction if it went the other way.
A - my parents cut me out of their lives and won't even talk to me anymore because they claim they're disappointed in me. They refuse to accept me for who I am!
Response - the monsters, they're toxic, you're better off without them, anyone who decides to cut off family contact just because you think differently to them is not someone who understands what it means to be family, they're not your real parents (and so on and so forth)
B - I've decided to cut my parents out of my lives and not even talk to them anymore. I have to be who I am and if they can't handle that, too bad!
Response- so brave and stunning and valid! you are a champion! you don't have to live with toxicity and if that means cutting off contact then that is what you have to do, if they can't change their minds about how they think then that's on them (and so on and so forth).
Maybe the parents don't want to talk to the kids, either? Maybe they'll be happier if the source of turmoil and distress in their lives is gone?
This cuts both ways. If parents are expected to unconditionally love and support their children no matter what, then the children have to do some accepting and tolerating too. Parents do have hopes and expectations for their children, and it's hard when those don't work out.
Too many of these kinds of posts that I read are all "I am owed EVERYTHING in the world, but I don't owe anything back in return!"
Absolutely there are different expectations and norms for what is okay in a parent/child relationship.
I see people saying "you should work to pay for your child's food", but if you force your child to work to make money for the household, suddenly people get up in arms about child labor or something. Totally different reaction the other way, huh?
Parents do have a responsibility to raise the child they have birthed into this world until that child's independent, and for that duration, it indeed does not cut both ways because the child is dependent and not mentally mature.
Once the child's independent and mature (varies, but often around 25), then I'm fine with children or parents deciding that the relationship is toxic and stepping back from it, regardless of the fictional view you've put in my mouth.
A parent creates their child and has enormous power over them for at least a decade and a half. Imagine thinking that doesn't impact the relationship in any way.
Children aren't owed everything in the world, and owe quite a bit to the world in return. They are owed everything their parents have to give and they owe nothing to their parents. Sorry.
"They are owed everything their parents have to give and they owe nothing to their parents."
No wonder moderns are not having kids but own pets instead. Much less hassle, much more dependable return of affection.
Children owe *nothing* to their parents? At all? Not to be abusive to them? Not to steal anything that's not nailed down to feed a drug habit? Not to be in a reciprocal relationship of affection but instead be a giant, entitled, perpetual toddler?
Ok slight overstatement - children owe the same duty of care to their parent as they do to any passerby on the street. No they don't have an entitlement to steal from and abuse them, but they also have no duty to maintain a relationship with them. That's not perpetual toddlerdom, it's the opposite. It's growing up. I have a good relationship with my parents but it's certainly not built on a sense of duty to them. Rather I appreciate their kindness and effectiveness in raising me and think of them as a resource. Like with my friends that also makes me want to be a resource to them. A relationship built on love, not duty.
But going the other way is different. Obviously in addition to love I have a duty to my daughter. Otherwise she'd die.
There's a lot of cultural variation in notions of whether and what parents owe children and children owe parents. It seems to me there's no one correct standard to even argue for.
It sounds like you have a clear idea for what you think is rightly owed in either direction of the parent/child relationship. Even in this one weird country I live in (the U.S.), subcultures of class, ethnicity, geography, specific family history show widely varying expectations around this. Notorious edge cases include things like are kids owed a college education paid for if parents can afford (or borrow) to pay, do parents have a duty to pay or help pay for things like addictions counseling, legal fees when kids get in trouble with the law, wedding expenses, or for various kind of enrichment experiences. That's just the money owed sense of it and obviously it gets way more variable when it comes to emotional support/boundaries -- rights of grandparents to visit grandkids, rights of parents to express opinions about how their grown children parent, what a parent feels a child owes a stepparent in terms of respect or emotional connection, what fathers and mothers feel they're owed differently, etc.
It seems to me Walrus isn't wrong, you're not wrong, Mek's not wrong and what each parent/child pair feel owed or feel they owe is going to get negotiated in each context. There's no objectively right way in this and it's been widely contentious for a really long time.
Agree that it's more complex than I'm making it (by a lot!) but get extremely irritated by folks who equate adult children choosing not to have a relationship with their parents to a parent cutting off a child. Having just had a child of my own, and having worked with folks who have had parents voluntarily end the relationship, it's not at all equivalent. An adult who chooses not to have a relationship with their parents is being hurtful, but a certain amount of separation is expected (in the U.S.) and even encouraged. A parent who chooses not to have a relationship with their adult child is crippling a life they brought into the world emotionally, materially, and spiritually.
Especially in the context of "discouraging lifestyles I disagree with," it's completely understandable for an adult whose parents do not support the things that make them happy to choose not to associate with those parents.
I don’t have a great argument for rejecting your perspective. It’s intuition all the way down. Imo children of parents who weren’t negligent or cruel owe everything to their parents, and parents of adult children have lesser duties to them.
I’m childless though so obviously much less informed than you.
This is an excellent point. Well said.
I really wonder what the current crop of teens and 20-somethings are going to do when they hit 50 and run out of authorities to rebel against.
Is there any evidence that would convince you you are wrong about this? Because it seems to be unfalsifiable, any lack of evidence is just evidence it's being suppressed.
Guessing that if this survey was done 20 years in future the results would look very different. When today’s readers were growing up there was almost no discussion in public schools around gender transition.
I believe both that “brainwashing” can have a significant effect on a child's decisions but that the main cause of homeschooled kids becoming queer is that their parents where unconventional in the first place.
If you are a normie, your further decision to homeschool your kids will not affect that.
There is a really strong data link between autism and transsexuality. Also Scott found out that they react fundamentally different to optical illusions (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P2nYKqwmHdYKARTG8/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions).
If I really didn't want my children to become transsexual I would do the usual of protective factors against autism (not have children late, good diet for the mother etc.)
However I have a second, extremely politically incorrect hypothesis that transsexuality is mostly caused through social isolation, the contact with trans ideology happens almost always in extremely eternally online circles, like niche discords, niche gaming communites (speedrunning, fighting games), niche music (bunch of super niche metal analysts or musicians became trans). It is always social isolation and too much time spent before the computer screen that predates gender change in my observation. It isn't quite sound, but if you are seriously worried about this the best think would be to just make sure that the kid has a normal social life, which is great for a thousand other reasons aswell...
Counter-example: Elliot Page?
Things can occur for multiple causes, and remember fame, like isolation, is its own stressor.
I know almost nothing about ftm transgender except that it is most likely more common than mtf transgender and drastically underreported on because all the reactionaries only care about theis sons cutting their dicks off. I am however open to the idea that ftm transgender follows different mechanics than ftm transgender.
"I know almost nothing about ftm transgender except that it is most likely more common than mtf transgender"
Historically not the case, so far as I understand
"because all the reactionaries only care about their sons cutting their dicks off"
Whereas being fine with your daughter cutting her tits off is better?
Given that transgenderism seems to cluster along with a lot of mental health problems, convince me that it is not a mental illness. "Grr argh fascist" is not an argument.
> Given that transgenderism seems to cluster along with a lot of mental health problems, convince me that it is not a mental illness
Plenty of things correlate with mental health issues. Having chronic pain? You bet that correlates with depression. Bullied in school? Obviously. Sexually abused as a child? Yup, that can cause trauma.
By the bar of "correlates with mental health problems", we'd have to classify everything from "being in debt" to "childhood trauma" as a mental illness. That does not seem very convincing to me.
To use the phraseology of the OP, having chronic pain does not correlate with "cutting your dick off". I submit that wanting to cut your dick off is not a healthy or normal signal.
> cluster along with a lot of mental health problems
[Semi-ironically]
It is also cluster along with high-functional autism which is how actual mental health looks like, so there.
> convince me that it is not a mental illness.
There is some specific mental condition which can be looked at as a part of neuro-divergent spectrum. There is some physiological reason why people are trans, or rather why they experience bodily dysphoria. And thus you can look at dysphoria as a disease and gender transition as a way to cure it. Not sure what this changes other than the fact that we now agree that gender-correcting procedures are supposed to be part of the universal healthcare.
You would want proof that gender transition is an effective cure for dysphoria though, and idk if that exists. It's a hell of a series of surgeries and hormonal supplements that wreck your body to get the benefit for a placebo effect .
I doubt it is monocausal, I am sure there are a variety of reasons people transition. I do think it is worth diving into why it is growing so quickly. In the past (~20 years ago) in my circles it really seemed mostly the method of cope by female abuse victims. Girls who had had horrible relationships with men, and wanted to retreat into a different identity because being a girl sucked. Then once they had a good relationship suddenly the desire evaporated (this includes someone who was "trans" for years and months from starting hormones/surgery). Now that is anecdata, but it always made sense to me.
Didn't have any experience with MTF so have less thoughts about that. It does seem to be consuming/overlapping a bit with the gay community.
My sister-in-law I would bet huge money on would identify as trans if she was a teen today. A bit autistic, struggled in school, always very butch (worked as a carpenter for a while), but in the most passive feminine way.
Was in love with another close female friend for a decade or more. Was living with a stoner loser guy that whole time platonically, and they still live together today 10 years later semi-platonically (I think there is now something romantic there) despite her identifying as a lesbian. As far as I know she has maybe never actually dated a woman.
You are onto something there. I am currently digging into Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) because the US army thinks it can be used to prevent the Obesity epidemic (https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/186/3-4/344/6006387, there are a bunch of papers more if you follow the trail).
IPT has a huge focus on your social role, they basically have four categories of errors which lead to various mental illnesses like depression (or for the army Loss of Control (Loc) eating), two of these failure conditions are loss of a social role and being challenged in your social role, with therapeutic maneuvers that include mourning the loss of a role and accepting the new one, or resolving intra-role challenges.
If social roles are so important for people that their brains go bust if they lose one, it only makes sense that being the loser of a social role (man who has no family, no influence, no power no nothing OR woman who has no family, no man, no social network, no connections) is a somewhat unbearable standpoint, as you are locked into a role you are thoroughly failing at. As such a "role reversal", a wiping clean of the slate, may be attractive for these persons.
There is another thing which I picked up in anti-woke Marxist circles, they say that capitalism inherently will offer more and more specialised micro roles, in which the subject is reframed into the perfect consumer through an infinite array of possible identities which all are inherently subject to the systems of capitalism. Not that I necessarily buy into Marxist theory, but it is interesting to keep that theory in mind.
> However I have a second, extremely politically incorrect hypothesis
Alternative, and quite obvious, common sense explanation is that the causation is reversed. Trans kids have troubles fitting in IRL, thus spend a lot of time online, hanging out with the people with the same niche interests.
It's sort of depressing to be reading your hypothesis on niche blog ACX (at 6AM...at least it's not on my phone?) while listening to Scandinavian metal and building MtG decks. And also remembering that the first people I came out to...were my Extremely Online MMO buddies, who knew for almost a decade before my irl friend (singular) and family.
Although, for the record, I learned of the concept via Wikipedia. Sex ed in my school/family was...ehm...lacking. There were some feeble attempts to found a chapter of Gay-Straight Alliance at my highschool, but they got laughed off campus. "We don't have any of those here!" (Narrator voice: Everyone became LGBT once they left for college.)
Now I am moderatly entertained that a bunch of cis people attack the hypothesis and the one trans person meets it perfectly. I have almost zero interaction with trans people or even lgbt irl (allegedly the former best friend of the sister of one of my friends became trans, but I have never even seen her in person). However the extremely online people I know know way more transsexuals than me, and my normie friends know even less (never even heard of one!). This got me thinking if maybe trans is related to social isolation or extreme online behaviour.
It is a bit cruel of a question, but because of the other IPT comment I wrote, did you feel like you failed at your previous gender role before transitioning?
Btw, green player here, hyped for toxic in green in ONE.
I do think part of the causality issue is that...if a trans person doesn't pass very well, or is otherwise fearful of being publically out, then of course you'll only know them at arm's-length through the Internet, if at all. Social life funges against personal risk, and all that. Conversely if they're at an advanced level...it's referred to in-community as "going stealth", of not bothering to identify oneself as trans outside ~any circumstances., even to other LGBT people. A somewhat rarefied bunch, but they're out there, confounding heuristics. Like I'm way more explicitly out here than anywhere in IRL...people generally can't tell, and if they mistake me for a gay dude instead, I don't bother correcting them. Just another unremarkable cashier at the grocery store either way, albeit one with strange fashion tastes. Thus contributing to "I don't know any trans people" in my own small way.
Hmm, yes, that's a plausible hypothesis I'd entertain. I've thought sometimes that if I were significantly more masculine, things woulda turned out differently...had romantic success ever, had better outlets for exercise (I actually don't hate sports and have some athletic/gym talent potential, but getting hazed in boys' locker rooms does a lot to beat such aspirations outta you), had better male role models. Most of the other guys I knew growing up were also loser nerds like me, or they were hulking football-team ogres who...seemed to revel in stupidity. Not exactly attractive paths to take! So it seemed logical to just nope outta that dynamic and choose a different character class. There wasn't really a thing like "nonbinary" at the time, so Doing Something Else Which Is Not That meant...female.
In similar vein, there's a pretty close Everett branch where I just end up being a typical gay guy instead. Good chunk of the same access to feminine mannerisms and fashion, less radical changes, greater acceptability, much better social prospects. Sadly I was raised in a pretty homophobic environment, so that never seemed like an acceptable choice until far, far too late. Didn't even realize I also liked boys until well into transition...
I guess it's weird in some ways to frame it as "a choice", cause that's rarely the typical narrative. For me though, childhood and disposition left me pretty...ambivalent gender-wise? I don't think I even had a firm grasp that there were strong dividing lines between guys and girls, masculine and feminine, until puberty or thereabouts. So the idea of arbitrary path-dependence horrified me when it sure looked like that path sucked a lot. Of course people are going to fail at gender roles if you assign ones that don't fit to begin with. (This is the only redeeming part of the "toxic masculinity" discourse, that the default Male roles available for lotsa people are fairly constraining, compared to what's on offer for Female.)
(Phyrexia is awful and I hate it and it can die in a fire. Rip Nahiri :( The only good thing to ever come out of Mirrodin is Equipment as a card type...but goddamn those mythic rare haymaker swords are dumb too. Like the new R/G protection one...throw that on Moraug? Main, land drop, additional combat, combat, post-main, additional land drop, additional combat.... Add in double strike, Scaretiller, and Tiller Engine for shits and giggles. Or additional-combat additional-main cards, how about Aggravated Assault? So dumb.)
I really appreciate the response! Transsexuality is just an intellectual curiosity for me, I don't really have any "skin in the game" as I am content with my gender role and don't know any lgbtq people irl anyway, as such I have to thank you for honoring my heartless investigations. Interestingly just yesterday, when I went boozing for titanic amounts, I heard about another ftm transgender in my far expanded acquintance circle, although in that case the prior girl already showed masculine behaviour before transition, he wanted to pick fights and get into physical brawls even before taking testosterone lol.
For a while I thought that transsexuality was accidentally solved through Jungian psychoanalysis, more specifically the concept of the shadow, even more specifically the concept of the animus for women or the anima for men. Basically people who can't accept the element of their soul that is of the mirrored gender get overcome by it, just as not accepting your shadow has you always becoming subservient to it. By now I have distanced myself a bit from that, especially since I am not really sure where I stand in the Jung vs Freud/Lacan split of psychoanalysis.
Contact with IPT through "whatever the hell the military is doing to get its recruits to be less fat" however has put me hot on the trail of "interpersonal role transition". The rise of transsexuality across the world could be a sign of traditional gender roles failing (leaving the discussion of wether that is by principle and spectrum based gender roles are more advanced/superior or wether that is because of terrible execution of traditional gender roles in postmodern societes aside) and people manually choosing a role transition if they can't find a satisfying subrole in the limits of their assigned gender role.
Both female and male gender roles seem corrupt to me at the time, with feminity having to suffer with some really weird stuff from 3rd and 4th wave feminism (I am strongly opposed to intersectionality), and traditional masculinity is literally getting pathologised with intentions to add toxic masculinity to certain mental illness catalogues (trashdaddy Zizek on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKGa6g8Kk5g)
I kinda believe in a weird Nietzschean sense of Will to Power (although even Nietzsche did not know what that means as he never finished his book on that), in that most people don't really have a lot of control over the things that are happening in their lifes, and having control over such choices due to hightened consciousness is generally unusual. As such for me the question would be less "Is there a choice between becoming trans or not in general?" and more "Is it a choice for each individual?". Basically how high your individual will to change yourself is decides wether it is a manual choice to change or wether you are changed by your environment.
(Fuck Nahiri, I am a simp for Sorin Markov and his daughterfu Avacyn. I am generally ambivalent to Phyrexians, but I love that they are killing Gatewatch members indiscriminately, including the compleation of Jace and his gf Vraska. I am really tired of the Marvel-style Gatewatch storytelling that dominated MTG recently. Will probably not stay that way for long, but at least it is a chance for stakes to appear. Gameplay wise I just want any monoG strategy to be viable in standard again, Teething Wurmlet artifact etb is kinda shit although very fun. Thinkin' about Teething Wurmlet into Skrel Hive in Selesnya)
From personal experience, highly-engaged in-person communities with similar political views to those isolated online cliques have even higher rates of gender changes than the similar online communities. (Specifically, an especially far-left college and its surroundings.) Screen time is definitely not a factor; being integrated into a community that is pro-X will, obviously, result in more X, and equally obviously people who are isolated want community more thaneothers.
From personal experience, highly-engaged in-person communities with similar political views to those isolated online cliques have even higher rates of gender changes than the similar online communities. (Specifically, an especially far-left college and its surroundings.) Screen time is definitely not a factor; being integrated into a community that is pro-X will, obviously, result in more X, and equally obviously people who are isolated want community more thaneothers.
I'd say that social media is more responsible than schools, although peer groups at school influenced by social media are an indirect cause. A lot of amateur gender therapists on social media think every teen with questions about their gender is trans and every trans person needs HRT yesterday.
Yeah in my experience with two teenage daughters it is much less the schools themselves than the peers and the peers are largely driven by social media.
If you want to tilt the odds in your favor keeping the kids off of phones/social media and sending them to a parochial school probably is your best bet.
CW, nitpick: imo “in your favor” is a potentially counter productive framing because of its judgmental connotation. Kids resent parental judgment. Parents can suppress them for a while but sooner or later the cat’s out of the bag anyway.
The thing that is most clear from your comment is that you don't have kids. When/if you do have kids, you are going to be super disappointed about how much control you have over things like their gender expression and other life choices.
"Well gosh, I just couldn't teach my kid not to be a rapist/serial killer/racist, there is no way parents can control life choices!"
These kinds of arguments are not accepted when it's policies the progressive side want to push - of course you can teach your kid not to partake in rape culture. Of course you can raise an anti-racist baby. Of course you can influence your children not to pollute and to be environmentally aware.
No, you can't control children as if they are robots, they have their own minds and personalities. But we do expect to be able to teach them values. And until they're old enough to leave the house and live on their own, yes parents definitely can have control over "gender expression", or whatever fashionable new term is in vogue next week.
You can engage in all the ridiculous reductio arguments you want, but the fact remains that, yes, parents obviously have *some* influence on their kids and also that that influence is both weaker and less direct than just about any parent would like. To take your example, I don't think that there are many parents raising their kids to be serial killers, and yet serial killers exist. I don't think there are many parents raising their kids to be trans or gay for that matter, and yet all of these types of people exist.
I can't even get my kid to stop doing self-defeating things that are explicitly in her self interest not to do, much less dump a set of my preferred values into her. Of course, she is acculturating to my upper middle class values simply by virtue of marinating in this environment, but there's not much I can do to deviate from this even with respect to aspects of the environment that I find distasteful.
You can easily hide behind vague generalities like "we expect to be able to teach kids values" (of course), so I want to be explicit here: no, I don't think parents have much control over "gender expression," and attempts to assert such control are likely to have unanticipated consequences, not least because they almost certainly come bundled with a bunch of other parental hang-ups that will be screamingly obvious to the kid.
"Gender expression" is a weasel term. What does it mean? Boys dressing up in skirts and eyeliner? That's been around for a long time.
Boys who think they're girls and girls who think they're boys?
Women wearing trousers? That's no longer a sign of "dressing like a man", but acceptable for everyone.
Be more clear as to what you mean. If you mean "Billy thinks he's a girl" then say that. Teenagers have been "expressing" themselves with clothing, hair colour and the rest of it.
If you mean "expressing my gender in a different way to the norms around expressing my gender" then parents will and do try to stop their kids doing dumb shit like tattoos and piercings. Maybe modern parents are more chill with it - or maybe not. I think it's still an indication of lower socio-economic class.
Yes when Billy and Susie go off to college, she can put a ring in her nose like she's cattle and he can wear makeup. Then they grow the fuck up and put away childish things.
And any parent who stands by and shrugs and goes "Nothing I can do" when their child is making foolish decisions, is considered neglectful. Are you *trying* to get your child to stop doing self-defeating things, or are you just shrugging and going "nature over-rides nurture"?
I imagine you are trying to influence away from damaging behaviour, even with all your words around "it's innate, parenting won't do much". And if your child was going out and hurting others or causing damage, damn sure you'd step in to put a stop to that, never mind any "parents don't have much control over their kids' life choices".
When they live as independent adults, they can make all the life choices they want, even if that means bad ones. But what parent will at least not try to stop their child making bad choices?
And *that's* where the disagreement lies. Belt of Truth says it's only "reactionaries" who care about "their sons cutting their dicks off". If someone thinks "cutting your dick off is a fine lifestyle choice, Billy" then of course they are going to object to the idea that a parent can - or should - have any control over this kind of lifestyle choice. Billy is really Susie, nothing I can do about that and I shouldn't even try.
But if it's innate for Billy to be Susie, it's just as innate for Billy to like torturing animals or fantasise about murdering the kids in his class. Yet nobody thinks that "oh no, you shouldn't even try to interfere with Billy's expression or his life choices" there.
No, I'm not going to be more clear about what I mean, because it's perfectly obvious. I'll just repeat myself: parents have indirect and limited control over their kids, whose values are mostly determined by the cultural milieu in which they are raised, of which parents are one small part.
The most obvious example of this is immigrant parents. If you are, say, from China and your kids are born in America and go to school in America, your kids will be American. They will be a little bit Chinese, but they aren't in any way shape or form going to fit in with a bunch of Chinese school kids in China. And if you go to heroic efforts to raise them Chinese in America, the most likely outcome is that they will find you annoying, overbearing, and out of touch. They will do what they need to to humor you and make the peace. You will have some influence over your kid, just not a ton.
I'm pretty sure there is no area more so than childrearing that people like to project their ideological biases, fantasies, and delusions onto. So, you know, join the club. In answer to your question about whether I try to get my child to stop doing self-defeating things: I spend endless amounts of time and energy trying to get her to stop doing self-defeating things. These efforts just don't work very well, because I am battling her personality.
I can certainly ban certain behaviors, and that may work for a while. I can tell my kid that she can't get a tattoo while I'm supporting her, and most likely she will obey me. But I'm not under any illusion that I'm winning this argument in the long term if she has different ideas. (This is hypothetical. My kid is eight and deathly afraid of needles.)
If you want to pour your energy into convincing your child that dressing a certain way violates the natural order, have at it. Most likely they were going to conform to gender norms anyway, since that's what most people do. And if they weren't going to, you might be able to shame them out of it. But if you think your kid isn't going to pick up on the emotional energy driving your weird culture war obsessions, well, good luck to you. Most likely they won't share that energy, and they will just do what they need to do to humor you.
"No, I'm not going to be more clear about what I mean, because it's perfectly obvious".
Yes, I think it is.
"parents have indirect and limited control over their kids, whose values are mostly determined by the cultural milieu in which they are raised, of which parents are one small part."
And you'll surely notice that many people talking about this here have been mentioning their ability (as parents) to control the social/cultural environment in which their kids are raised.
Thus the mentions of various school types and keeping them off social media and the like.
"If you are, say, from China and your kids are born in America and go to school in America, your kids will be American. They will be a little bit Chinese, but they aren't in any way shape or form going to fit in with a bunch of Chinese school kids in China."
This is something I have experience with, so I'd say that your take should be nuanced a bit. The parents can certainly increase the odds of the kid fitting in with Chinese school kids in China. Most obviously, they can move to China. If they stay in America, they can find a school where most of the students are first-generation Chinese, so that most of the kid's friends will probably be Chinese. If they can't do that, they can at least teach the kid the Chinese language and the basics of Chinese culture. The cultural milieu in which the kids are raised can be changed by the parents.
Can you raise a child to not be autistic? Some mental traits aren't so simple to change.
You can control if a child *expresses* their gender identity, in a "you're not allowed to wear skirts" sense, but I'm not aware of any therapy or parenting strategy that can make a trans person not *want* to be a particular gender. And the brute force "no, you're not allowed to identify as a woman in my house" is unlikely to be good for your relationship with them.
One confounder I'll note among the trans, mid-20's people I've known: a disproportionate share seem to come from environments with very strong, fairly essentialist views on gender roles--so "I like cooking and sewing, and hate open aggression" translates to "I must be a girl" more than in some other environments.
I think there is a lot to this and more generally to the notion that a lot of the "gender dysphoria" among kids has less to do with biological gender than with gender roles. It is worth noting that it's surprisingly common in lots of traditional societies with strong gender norms for there to be an accepted "third gender" in which someone switches roles. And also that terms like gay and transgender don't map cleanly to this social arrangement. E.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%CA%BBafafine
Meh I am a bit skeptical of this kind of claim. A lot of the examples I have been provided in the past are post hoc modern creations presented as traditional practices when you dive deep into them. Or are jsut twisting words around to mean other things.
I mean in 19th century England you could call someone a "fop" or "dandy", that didn't mean there were "three accepted genders". Some of the analysis really reeks of that kid of stretching. Always be skeptical of new anthropological claims that match modern political needs.
I think you are really wrong about this, but I don't have deep anthropological expertise here. For what it's worth, the phenomenon in the article I link to is 1) absolutely real -- I have been to Samoa and it is a widely known and generally accepted aspect of many Polynesian cultures; 2) long, long predates current arguments about contemporary gender norms; and 3) definitely exists elsewhere. For example, there is analogous situation in the Balkans dating back to the 1500s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sworn_virgins
This has nothing to do with "fops" or "dandies." It is a practice in which in which members of one gender choose to live as the other gender in all manners of dress, social custom, and even pronouns. Often this is legally recognized and certainly it is culturally recognized, often even in societies where homosexuality is taboo. Be as skeptical as you want, but this stuff happens.
Did you read the "motivations" section of that article?
This. Not once in the endless list of motivations was there any mention of "actually being a man". Balkan sworn virgins are not transgender.
>I mean in 19th century England you could call someone a "fop" or "dandy", that didn't mean there were "three accepted genders".
So, to be clear, your evidence that a gender-non-conforming "third gender" doesn't historically exist is that you can immediately point to examples of widely accepted categories of gnc individuals in western history?
No its more than GNC individuals were not necessarily considered "third genders" in the sense people now claim.
Right, but that's just a cultural quirk of description, not a categorical one. You could just as easily say the same about e.g. ASD individuals, or people with schizophrenia, but just because we didn't have the same language or categories to talk about them doesn't mean they didn't exist.
This is more or less my take. We’re not used to living in a world where men and women are all allowed, much less encouraged, to do each other’s traditional “stuff”. The stronger the messaging about “boy things” and “girl things”, the harder it might be to feel good about thinking/feeling/liking certain stuff without feeling disqualified from one gender or another.
I didn’t grow up with terribly strict rules here despite coming from a relatively socially conservative home. I think this is why I find it much easier to grasp being trans than non-binary. I just can’t imagine a thought that would disqualify me from simply being a woman, or qualify any aspect of myself as male. In my head, “woman” is an incredibly stretchy category, and nothing short of actually wanting to completely be a man could evict even a little bit me from that. The challenge non-binary people pose to me is that in validating their identities, which proceed from different first principles, I’m implicitly accepting that there are thoughts and ideas that are “male” and *should* push me out of my own binary. And I balk at that, because to me the whole idea of egalitarianism was that the ideas and thoughts lose their binary connotations and became available to me in my identity as a woman.
I haven’t resolved this. I really liked having biology as the be-all-end-all of gender, because it seemed so much better than classing objects, thoughts and feelings by gender. But I want to be hospitable to trans people, so I’m cool with having other signals be strictly gendered. I need them myself to inhabit my own identity to my satisfaction. An inscrutable identity is no identity at all for most of us.
I think what we have today is the product of rising egalitarianism, so not a bad thing. But weird side effect of things not being so strictly gendered is that it becomes harder to feel comfortable as one gender or another, and that’s enough to tip people with certain mental presets and environmental influences over some line. The downside is that we’ve all lost some powerful tools to inhabit our identities, innate and/or created. I think gender roles are really necessary to self-actualize, and as much as we try to break them down they’re constantly re-forming. My best guess is that some set of external signals will coalesce around the idea of being non-binary, it will become legible and boring and the numbers will level out. Learning about all this in school will probably just accelerate that process.
Anecdata, but my experience of this is exactly opposite. In my social circle, it's the more progressive families that have higher trans rates (teens rather than mid-20s, if anyone thinks that makes a difference).
Socially progressive and essentialist gender ideas are in practice not a contradiction imo. Sure, we don't ussualy associate these two together. And when asked directly, someone who identifies as progressive will say that eg girls can be tough too and boys can be caring and men can clean and women can cook.
However, what is the actual behavior in those circles? Who works more, who takes care of children more, what clothes are worn by who, who wears make-up, who are football fans.
Anecdata: 2 young adults from progressive circles with understanding parents, accepted by their social circle. Reasons they identify as trans: 1. feeling like they don't fit in with the boys, having a soft personality, has hobbies they think are female, likes to wear skirts. And 2. not liking girly stuff, hates make-up and dresses, feels uncomfortable compared to other women, has hobbies they think are manly.
If you look at the regional variation it's the opposite of what you've observed.
So how come the rate of transgenderism is much higher now, where essentialist views on gender are uncommon, than they were in the past, when they were universal?
You are reading too much causality into correlation - this is observational, not prospective. People are forgetting that children aren't randomly assigned schooling methods. The children who end up in different schooling environments certainly differ significantly from each other.
Specifically relevant for our example, is that a significant percentage of homeschooled students (I don't know whether that is ~10% or ~90% or somewhere in between) are home-schooling because brick and mortar schools did not work out or were obviously non-viable.
Oftentimes, this is due to the children having social issues and not fitting in. Remember, autistic people are much likelier to experience gender dysphoria than non-autistic people.
So it is not shocking that homeschooled people would have a high frequency of trans identity.
It still seems likely enough that putting them in a public school would only make it worse.
Additionally, the survey results are from 3 years ago, and more significantly, describe the results of readers largely decades past their years of public schooling or alternatives.
Seeing a lack of positive correlation between those who attended public schools in the 80s and 90s and those who identity as trans, is *not* a reason to assume to that the lack of positive correlation would remain between those in public schools in this decade and trans identity some decades later.
FWIW, we were part of a few homeschooling groups in two states as our son was growing up and there was always a significant minority of homeschoolers who have ASD and the parents are homeschooling because there were adequate family resources to pull that off and it seemed easier to them than navigating all the services necessary for their children to make schooling workable.
My impression is that homeschoolers break down into:
* majority are doing for religious reasons (as many as 80% I think?)
* secular homeschooling because kids are off of one bell curve or another (includes kids with ASD)
* homeschooling for ideological reasons
* homeschooling for parent/child-rearing philosophy reasons
* homeschooling for life circumstance reasons (traveling careers, etc)
My unscientific impression is that of the minority of secular homeschoolers, the ones homeschooling because kids are off a bell curve in some way is as large as the three categories that come after. I say this in support of the idea that the percentage of transgender homeschoolers may be influenced by the percentage of transgender people with ASD.
Based on what I know of the homeschooling community -- more than most, but not a member of that community -- it is possible that the higher likelihood of a homeschool kid being trans may be that the kid was homeschooled because he/she did not fit in at school. So the parents pull the kid out to homeschool because regular school was not going well because the kid didn't fit in. Then some of those kids who didn't fit in, it turns out, did not fit in because they were trans.
"Hmmmm if I were to homeschool my future kids, one of the primary motivations would be so they wouldn't be brainwashed into being trans... But this shows that that homeschooled kids are the most likely to go trans"
As a general rule, I am cautious about using homeschooling AVERAGES when trying to draw conclusions about homeschooling for specific situations.
Two anecdotes to illustrate:
*) A homeschooling colleague (former Stanford STEM prof, at the time working for a biotech startup) from a few decades back uses a three-bin clustering to describe homeschoolers:
a) The stereotypically religious who read the Bible every day
b) Sandal wearing granola parents who read John Holt
c) Those who are focused on academics and find schools such as Palo Alto High School unacceptable
[NOTE: His gross stereotyping for effect :-)]
One *can* average everyone in all three bins together as "homeschoolers" but if someone plans to homeschool they probably know which bin they fit into. The other bins might not be relevant for prediction purposes.
*) A YMCA swim instructor from 20 years back (who was one of the best people I have ever seen with children) noted that the kids she saw binned out as:
a) Public school: More resilient then the public school kids if not as 'high powered' (e.g. smaller vocabularies for age). Handled setback well.
b) Private school: Less resilient, more high powered, less self-directed
c) Homeschoolers: Completely all over the map and totally unpredictable.
The key point here is (c) ... again, one could generate an average, but it might not be very useful if the spread is wide and the spread is not randomly distributed for any specific situation.
Homeschooling means that more of your peer group is family, siblings and perhaps children of your parents' friends, less random age peers. So whether that means more woke, pro trans, or whatever or less depends on the composition of those peer groups.
I agree, with the caveat that some less structured or less supervised homeschooled kids may be more online than school kids and that may increase the influence of social media.
At a slight tangent, I wonder to what extent social media interactions end up age segregated. That's one of the things I don't like about the conventional model of schooling. When I was fourteen I should have been arguing with adults and socializing with kids my age or younger.
Our home unschooled daughter did her online socializing largely on World of Warcraft, which I would expect to result in a not very age segregated pattern — her mother and I were on too. SSC, ACX and DSL all have a wide mix of ages. I don't know to what extent that's true of social interactions on FB or Discord or ... .
There's nothing inherent to the task of homeschooling a child that makes them more likely to be trans. I think your fear is misplaced. Scott warned about the low sample size for this question, the percentages are so close it's hard to argue these findings are significant, no?
eh, purely speculation, but IMO your choice of co-parent, and your relationship with your future kids will have a lot more to do with that, than what form of education you choose.
But it may be that homosexual children are more likely to not fit into earlier society, and thus be more likely to help been homeschooled.
I wouldn't generalize this survey result that much given the vagueness of the term "have changed their gender", which is not the same as attempting to change their sex. This likely includes things like people who identify as "genderfluid" because it sounds cool but don't actually behave any differently from anyone else.
It's still weird that homeschools and public schools have equal amounts of both, but it's hard to tell what the mix is from this data alone, and I still anticipate public schools having higher rates of kids actually attempting to medically transition.
Parents who choose different approaches to schooling are different, and their children thus differ, wherever you stand on the nature/nurture thing. Children also often have input, and children who push in different directions are different.
This is beyond confounded, and can't be fixed by tossing a couple of variables in the magic unconfounding jar.
Apologies if this comes across as rude, but this is the kind of social science statistical analysis that really winds me up.
Scott has definitely shown merely correlations, and these don't necessarily imply causations. However, it is even less likely that something causes the opposite of what it's correlated with, or that it is a strong cause for something it's not correlated with, so there is still useful data to update your priors on here (though more in the direction of 'X probably doesn't cause Y, or at least don't cause it much' than 'X definitely causes Z').
Actually, things very often cause things they're uncorrelated or anticorrelated with. For example, consider someone driving on a hilly highway while intentionally keeping their speed constant. Their speed will not be very correlated with the amount of fuel usage or whether they're going up or down hill. However, both of those factors have a strong causal effect on speed.
For another example, consumption of full fat dairy products is correlated with lower childhood obesity compared to low fat dairy products. However, it could be that parents with obese children choose to give them lower fat dairy products because they think it will help - and the parents could be right! Maybe it helps, but doesn't fully return the child's weight to baseline. (I don't know whether full fat dairy causes obesity. My point is simply that the correlation doesn't tell us much.)
> However, it is even less likely that something causes the opposite of what it's correlated with, or that it is a strong cause for something it's not correlated with
Yeah, kind of like how the correlation between ibuprofen use and headaches makes it very unlikely ibuprofen could cause the opposite.
Good point! The relevant link there though is that headaches cause ibuprofen. The correlation is because of a causation, but you have to consider the temporal relationship to work out which way round the causation runs. So long as we're confident that the survey respondents feelings about school came after they went to school, then we can rule out this confounder.
OP was talking about the parents, which come (temporally) before the education. The hypothesis is that the parents cause the style of education, and they also (through nature or nurture, take your pick) cause certain values/beliefs in their kids. These values/beliefs will inform how people answer questions such as ”did you hate high school?” Hence the education style will correlate with the responses, but there is no causal link. Both are a function of mom and dad. This cannot be ruled out without control, and it’s hard to see how one could control for it.
So, you're suggesting that eg. the kind of kid most likely to enjoy home-schooling is one whose parents are most likely to try home-schooling? That's still very useful information, even if it doesn't generalise to most children and parents!
Absolutely cracking first article on the survey results for this year - keep em coming!!
This is from a few years ago - when I was doing this year's survey I remembered that past surveys existed and did a little more work with them.
I'm very curious now how those 2020 SSC results relate to the 2023 ACX results.
Also, can someone translate SAT scores for me?
Second that, mentioning the average score or some more context would be helpful for non-US readers.
Here's a document with percentile correlations: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
At least for 2022 sample (but they purposely make it pretty stable over time), 750 Verbal was 98th percentile, while 740 Math was 94th percentile. The scores for each section range from 200-800.
Thanks. 98th and 94th percentile as for all SAT users I understand.
Would be even 99th or 98th for a nationally representative sample the source says.
So, most students take the SAT, why is this? I thought SAT was specifically related to / used for college admission?
And yes, that's obviously an impressive score.
> So, most students take the SAT, why is this? I thought SAT was specifically related to / used for college admission?
It's given to high school students, who are usually encouraged to at least consider college as an option. People who score highly can be offered scholarships which may enable them to pursue options they might not otherwise be able to afford.
A substantial majority of US high school graduates go to college (and presumably a larger number at least seriously consider it).
The test was changed in 1994 and is now easier.
Wikipedia has the percentiles for some years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Percentiles_for_total_scores_(2006)
Note that a total score of 1300 was 96.55 percentile in 1984.
This survey data is from 2020, so a survey taker who was about 43 would likely have taken the harder test. I think the ages in the survey are rounded to the nearest decade. About 13% of respondents are 50 older, so approximately that many took the harder test.
The test has changed a number other times as well, not just 1994. 2016 may have been the next largest change. While both changes have been characterized by some as making the test easier, the changes were orthogonal to just turning the difficulty knob and any changes to score distribution are secondary effects.
Thanks for correcting me. I now see that the scores were renormed in 1995, after the changes introduced in 1994. I guess this is why scores before the mid-90s look so different, instead of the test getting "easier."
Verbal scores were boosted maybe 70 points from 1994 to 1995, but Math scores only about 10 points.
The pre-1995 Verbal SAT test was hard. In 1991, only nine boys (and no girls) got perfect 800s on both math and verbal, although 800 on the math was not uncommon among, say, Rice U. students.
Henry Harpending called the old SAT Verbal. the best high-end IQ test in the world.
Checking the public results, those aged 50 (rounded to the closest decade) and older had a mean verbal score of 709 (SD 64), with 414 responding.
Thirty-three reported a perfect 800.
As a voucher enthusiast I am surprised that private and home schools don’t have more of a lead over public schools in terms of satisfaction. Maybe it’s because of the high achieving selection of ACX readers? Kids who are smart are more supported by teachers and administrators?
There's a wide range in quality of public education in this country. Many ACX readers probably grew up with upper-middle-class suburbs with high-quality public schools. Vouchers make most sense in poorer, especially urban districts with lower-quality schools.
Hm. Maybe it's different in a bigger city; but growing up, there were three or four main public high-schools, and all of them were equally awful — the well-off universally sent their kids to one of the three spendy private high-schools. (Being Texas, all three were varying degrees of religious too — although, honestly, I'm sort of glad about that; Biblical knowledge has actually sort of come in handy, and it certainly helped develop my skepticism, heh.)
I would guess this varies by region. In the Bay Area, for example, Cupertino is known for having really good public schools, and affluent parents will live in Cupertino so they can send their kids to the public schools there.
There's a cycle of good schools -> increased local housing demand from affluent parents -> increased housing prices -> less affluent families priced out; most schoolchildren are from affluent houses -> even better schools.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-attend-Monta-Vista
To elaborate on your point of ACX readers being high achieving, the relationship between alternative schooling methods and satisfaction could be like the relationship between height and basketball prowess.
Height may be positively correlated to basketball prowess, but among those extremely talented at basketball (the NBA), one may not find that taller players have more prowess. However, being tall makes it much likelier that someone will be in the group of highly talented players in the first place.
Similarly, being homeschooled could make it much likelier that one will be successful, but after conditioning the sample based on that feature, we may no longer see the association.
However, if this were correct, we would expect that the percentage of ACX readers who be disproportionately home-schooled and private schooled compared to the general population, just as we find that NBA players are much taller than the general population.
I don't know if this is the case, as I don't know the age distribution in the sample, and the rate of schooling by type at the time that they were being educated.
The home/public difference seems very impressive to me. I wouldn't expect too much private/public difference, most private schools seem like the same model as public schools, only ritzier.
Fair enough, but I have now been convinced voucher type private schooling won’t increase education scores vs public (contrary to my priors) and now we have the possibility that they won’t increase satisfaction much either. But I guess the case is still there of parental choice, possibly cost and the argument that if a voucher system isn’t any worse than a public system, a voucher system should be the default not the public one because freedom.
On what basis would you think that vouchers wouldn't increase education scores? If it is on the basis of the comparison of SAT scores of public schools and private schools in this sample, note that private school outperformed public by 15 points in the verbal section, and outperformed them in math by 14 points.
More significantly, these represent just the tails of distributions for both, so are not very representative of their respective means, (besides for the issue in my other comment (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ssc-survey-results-on-schooling-types/comment/12005613) about conditioning on success).
As for an actual study of vouchers, Thomas Sowell looked at the performance of pupils in charter schools that shared buildings with non-charter public schools, and drew from the same population, but granted slots based on lottery.
He found consistent significant higher scores in the charter schools vs. the non-charter public schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_Schools_and_Their_Enemies.
Lastly, and this is most relevant for Scott's point about private / public, I suspect that the marginal benefit of private schools (or other non-homeschool options, like public charter schools) vs. public schools would be larger among worse schools than better schools.
E.g. in a third of public schools in Baltimore, not a single student in the whole school tested proficient in math (https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/13-baltimore-city-high-schools-zero-students-proficient-in-math).
This extreme failure seems very easy for an alternative school to improve - any students testing proficient would be an infinite improvement!
In a high performing public school, however, there is less room for possible improvement.
The sorts of disadvantaged students who would benefit the most from alternatives to traditional schools (e.g. by learning something, instead of nothing), would hardly be represented in this sample regardless of whether they got the better option, so we would not expect to see large performance benefits to the homeschooled cohort.
However, the broader studies I've seen have all pointed to not just homeschoolers outperforming public schoolers (e.g. https://www.nheri.org/homeschool-sat-scores-for-2014-higher-than-national-average/) but charter schools students outperforming equivalent peers, as cited from Sowell.
My response was based on reading of this paper: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jel.20150679
The key quote was “the best-identified studies suggest that winning a voucher has an effect on achievement that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. “
As they say a lot of studies are difficult to interpret due to selection effects. In fact I think Scott has coined the phrase “if an analysis of an education intervention shows benefits and if it can be due to selection it is due to selection “. Maybe the studies you quoted refute this, I certainly hope so.
As I said I remain a voucher supporter for other reasons.
The main advantage of the private religious schools I attended was that the school could "un-invite" kids who made a nuisance of themselves. What remained were the reasonably well-behaved students who, even if they weren't great academic performers, weren't going to prevent anyone else from learning.
I think the survey shows that private schools are better if you want your kids to avoid misery.
25% of public school attendees rated satisfaction at 3 or lower vs. only 13% for private school attendees.
4% public school rated it 1 vs. 2% private.
*edited comment because percents were off by 2x
Yeah, the net worth and social status of the parents is unrelated, it was definitely the improved history classes.
Since the survey has a question related to childhood class, you could check. Here's the percentage of respondents rating 3 or less to school satisfaction who also answered both the "childhood class" and "school type" questions:
Rich kids in private schools -> 7.4%
Rich kids in public schools -> 16.5%
Upper Middle Class in private schools -> 14.4%
Upper Middle Class in public schools -> 21.2%
Middle Class in private schools -> 14.1%
Middle Class in public schools -> 23.0%
Working-lower Class in private schools -> 25%
Working-lower Class in public schools -> 32.6%
Poor in private schools -> 41.7%
Poor in public schools -> 43.2%
No, I don't think it's history class. I'd guess it's private schools' ability to reject the most disruptive students. The "poor" results weaken that interpretation, but there are other reasons why being poor in a private school might be unpleasant.
Maybe because private schools are better at differentiating lessons for gifted students? Whereas the public schools force gifted students to complete tediously easy worksheets and won’t let them bring their own books into class and never give them the opportunity to learn anything new.
Maybe it's just my demographic, but the narrative I always heard about public schools is that they support middling students the most, especially when standardized tests are involved. The reason being that students at the top are going to pass anyway and students at the bottom are going to fail no matter what. I no longer feel quite as sure that this is true looking back compared to how I felt about it when I was actually in school though.
When I was in school (80s/90s), there were definitely a lot of programs to provide extra resources for gifted students; now that my kids are in school (middle & high), things are much more lockstep and deviations are only available for the left side of the distribution.
No child left behind == no child gets ahead.
I understand that there is a general skepticism about p value and statistical hypothesis testing, but without even a standard deviation those values are pretty much useless.
EDIT: nvm I confused std and confidence interval, ignore me.
I'm confused - Scott is reporting results from his survey, how could there be standard deviations? He's not doing any statistical analysis.
Thanks, I mixed up std and confidence interval - edited my comment
Yeah, Scott really should have reported confidence intervals for those measurements. Maybe he should partner with someone who's better at statistics? That would also let him do that regression he wanted to do.
There were 8000 respondents, which means even very minor differences are statistically significant, but that doesn't mean they matter in real life.
Yes, that's why I suggested to report the std instead of doing statistical testing. This would give at least a small indication of the overlapping of the distributions, and will tell you a lot about how to change your beliefs. E.g. let's say we have something like
Rate of life satisfaction
Government school: 5.63 with a std of ~3
Religious school: 5.87 with a std of ~3
It's an minuscule difference which I won't give much weight to, compared to having the same results with a std of let's say 0.1.
I believe this method to be better than the confidence interval which as you suggested would result in very high confidence due to the massive amount of respondants. But do we really care about the REAL population mean? Or do we care more about the spread of the responses? I would argue for the latter. (Sorry for overexplaining)
Thanks for the explanation. Here are some standard deviations:
APPROVAL RATING:
Home: 7.04 +- 2.40
Public: 5.63 +- 2.38
Religious: 5.87 +- 2.40
Private: 6.44 +- 2.26
Unschooling: 6.00 +- 2.74
LIFE SATISFACTION;
Home: 6.72 +- 2.30
Public: 6.56 +- 2.10
Religious: 6.65 +- 2.06
Private: 6.62 +- 2.12
Unschooling: 6.03 +- 2.56
SOCIAL SATISFACTION
Home: 5.93 +- 2.36
Public: 5.73 +- 2.22
Religious: 5.92 +- 2.23
Private: 6.00 +- 2.20
Unschooling: 5.63 +- 2.50
Thanks! In fact, I guess most people would want to answer questions such as "how likely is that my child will be better off doing homeschooling than public school?" - then we don't care whether on average, amongst 8000 people, we can spot a small difference. We care about the distributions. So since the spread is pretty high I would say that deciding between one will, in most cases, not matter at all.
There are still an awful lot of families for whom the stats don't matter, because it's more about what they realistically have access to.
We homeschool because we can't afford private, and the local public schools are crap. None of these stats would change our income, or the performance of our local schools.
Thanks for raising this. This was my gut reaction when reading the numbers but I didn't know what to ask for. The SDs here I read as indicating that none of these results are significant. Is that how you also read it?
The long thread above about fear of homeschooling being a contributor to transgenderism seemed a very big thing to load onto a smaller sample size with small differences. But the correlations relating to other variables drawn from the whole sample also seem insignificant.
No, this is not the correct interpretation. The results are significant which means that there is an aggregated difference amongst the groups. It also means that if you repeat the survey again you will get a fairly similar mean.
The problem with the means is that it doesn't give you a strong idea about how variable those results are from an individual to another. Eg if your child goes to private school there is a 0.01% (made up number) chance they will do better in life than if they go to a public school.
This would be significant, but is it a number we should care about? Whatever is your answer, sometime this is the question we wanna answer, not the presence of some aggregated difference. Notice the mean alone won't allow you to get this info.
The number above can be computed exactly with a few assumptions, with the mean and std provided above by Scott. But it's late now in Italy, maybe tomorrow!
Is this a raw standard deviation or a standard error of the mean? Can you also post the sample sizes for each group?
If this is indeed an SEM, it changes the interpretation of the article to be basically a null result. I don't know that reporting the means or inviting people to opine on them is justified by the data.
Agreed, this is pretty mileading. 6.72 vs 6.56 is way less than. A standard error, and not even close to being statistically significant. Scott should have just posted "there were no significant differences on all these measures."
I did some calculation:
Here is the probability that an individual from each group will have a better outcome (e.g. LIFE/SOCIAL SATISFACTION) than an individual from Public school. Remember that the baseline is 50%, which indicates that there is a 50/50 chance that the individual will do better/worse in, for example, "religious" school than public school, and this happens if the means and stds from the 2 groups are the same:
APPROVAL RATING
home: 74.051%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 54.371%
private: 64.640%
unschooling: 56.494%
LIFE SATISFACTION
home: 53.040%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 51.747%
private: 51.165%
unschooling: 40.303%
SOCIAL SATISFACTION
home: 53.723%
public(control): 50.000%
religious: 53.600%
private: 55.109%
unschooling: 48.164%
Another way of looking at this: subtract 50% from each value, and now they indicate the increase in likelihood that an individual from a school is gonna do "better" than an individual from public school.
Example: if you put your child to a private school, there is 5.1% increase in chance that they will have a higher SOCIAL SATISFACTION than a person from a public school.
python code: https://paste.ofcode.org/EmGPgKgC2qvhNRmCrCbmCU
Finally, I do believe this is a better metric in a lot of cases.
However, final disclaimer, I am not a statistician, but I work in a field related to Psychology and ML.
Gender non-conformity is quite strongly associated with poverty, so it is not a good measure of weirdness when your categories are correlated with poverty. Specifically, higher rate of gender non-conformity in home schooled population may be partially statistically explained by the higher rate of poverty.
"Specifically, higher rate of gender non-conformity in home schooled population may be partially statistically explained by the higher rate of poverty."
Are the home schooled more likely to be living in poverty as children? My impression was that since parents had to be responsible for their children's education and would be assessed to make sure the kids were reaching standards, that it would be better-off parents doing this - one parent at least who can be full-time at-home with the kids and able to get textbooks and do the kind of "now kids let's learn about X" experiments and field trips and visits to museums and art galleries and so on.
Though if kids are being 'home schooled' because they dropped out of school and there are other circumstances where they're living in broken homes, that would correlate with poverty.
Looking up the demographics, there are some fascinating results:
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/homeschool-demographics/
"Analysis: The NHES 2012 and NHES 2016 found sharp increases in the rate of homeschooling among Hispanic students. According to NHES estimates, the number of Hispanic children being homeschooled rose from just over 250,000 to just under 450,000 between 2012 and 2016.
Analysis: Between the NHES 1999 and the NHES 2016, the percentage of students being homeschooled by parents without a high school diploma or GED rose while the number of students being homeschooled by parents with a graduate or professional degree fell. The rise in the number of students being homeschooled by parents who have not completed high school or a GED is consistent across the NHES 2012 and NHES 2016; in 2012, 11% of homeschooled students fell into this category; in 2016, 15% did.
Analysis: The NHES 2003 found that homeschooled students were as likely as other students to be poor and more likely to be near-poor. After 2003, the NHES stopped reporting the percentage of students who were near-poor, so it is impossible to know whether this finding holds true today. The elevated rate of near-poverty among homeschooled students may have been the result of some homeschooling families’ giving up a second income.
Analysis: In contrast to previous surveys, which have typically found roughly the same level of poverty among homeschooling families as among other families, the NHES 2016 found that homeschooled students were more likely than other students to live below the poverty level. This change is likely related to shifts in racial demographics and levels of parental education also evident in the 2016 survey.
Analysis: The NHES 2012 found that homeschooled children were more likely than other children to live in households with two parents (biological, adoptive, step, or foster). Roughly one in five homeschooled children lived in a household with one parent (compared with nearly a third of students overall).
Analysis: The NHES 2012 found that homeschooled children were more likely than other students to have two parents with one in the labor force. While the survey found that over a third of homeschooled children have two parents in the labor force, what this looks like in practice is unclear; in some cases a homeschooling parent may stay home to educate their children while taking on flexible work on the side. "
So very roughly - homeschooling is mostly white kids, though with increasing numbers of Hispanic kids. Parents are less educated and less well off *but* households are more stable, with two-parent families and at least one parent working.
Are these parents who don't trust what is happening in public schools with regard to education, or think public schools are too dangerous? Why pull the kids out of public school to homeschool them?
Some states don't require assessment of the students.
Also, two parents with one in the workforce is the classical setup for homeschooling as the non-working parent has to provide daycare since schools aren't utilized. This means generally you get one parent with a higher than average income but an aggregate household income that can be lower. I knew very few families that were exceptions to this.
This causes some weird things with class, where the profession and culture of the family is higher than the income would suggest.
"Some states don't require assessment of the students."
California is one of those states.
Yes, this. I could nearly double our household income by going back to work instead of homeschooling our kids. We're kind of poor, on paper. That's voluntary.
I do notice that in Scott's stats, the rate of homeschooling goes down as income goes up-- I'm curious if that's true of the population at large, or if the SSC readership is too much of an outlier to draw conclusions from.
Yeah I was really surprised recently when a Hispanic woman with just a HS degree who was working for me on a project and whose husband always worked away from the home said she was homeschooling her youngest kid. She put in a lot of hours on the project each day (and was good), and I was wondering when the "schooling" was happening.
"My impression was that since parents had to be responsible for their children's education and would be assessed to make sure the kids were reaching standards"
Not true in California, where we home unschooled our kids.
We're in that demographic-- near-poor, two parents, one working, homeschooling the kids.
Why? Because even if we were both working, we couldn't afford to live in a good school district, or pay tuition. The local schools here are crap. The best we can do for our kids is teach them ourselves, and for that, it's worth living on one modest income.
I think home schooled children in US come from slightly poorer but more educated families on average https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/homeschool-demographics/ , at least more recently and this is also seen from the ACX survey. Which makes sense to me, as one of the logical pathways to home schooling is to have educated parents who cannot afford to live near a good school.
I think that this isn't the right way of looking at those numbers. As someone else pointed out: only 1 in 3 households with children have a stay-at-home parent, whereas a stay-at-home parent is basically the default for homeschool families. Intuitions about a two-parent-two-income family that earns $125k compared to a two-parent-two-income family that earns $65k aren't the same for a two-parent-one-income family that earns $65k.
One of the logical pathways is to have educated parents who cannot afford to live near a good school. Another way is to have well-paid parents who can afford to have one not work.
Can you share a reference for that?
I see a lot of reports that there are high rates of poverty among transgender adults. It wasn't clear to me that that meant they were also raised in poverty. And nothing I saw pertained to gender non-conformity in childhood.
Seems to be a decent source of data here, though it has more about poverty with adults (trans or LGBT+) than youth as such.
There is a report from 2014 on LGBT youth in Los Angeles in foster care, how that scales up to the national level I don't know:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/sgm-youth-la-foster-care/
"13.6% of foster youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning, 13.2 % reported some level of same-sex attraction, and 5.6% identify as transgender. This means that there are between 1.5 to 2 times as many LGBTQ youth living in foster care as LGBTQ youth estimated to be living outside of foster care"
Presumably being in foster care means coming from homes and families with problems, and more likely to be living in poverty. For the gender non-conforming, they have a figure of 11.1% along with the above 5.6% transgender figure.
For general rate of transgenderism in adults and youth:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
"In this study, we use data from the 2017 and 2019 YRBS and the 2017- 2020 BRFSS to find that:
Over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older.
Among U.S. adults, 0.5% (about 1.3 million adults) identify as transgender. Among youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S., 1.4% (about 300,000 youth) identify as transgender.
Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.
Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. We find that youth ages 13 to 17 are significantly more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).
The racial/ethnic distribution of youth and adults who identify as transgender appears generally similar to the U.S. population, though our estimates mirror prior research that found transgender youth and adults are more likely to report being Latinx and less likely to report being White compared to the U.S. population."
For transgender youth, racial/ethnic identification is as follows:
Latinx - 1.8%
AIAN (American Indian Alaskan Native) - 1.8%
All other races - 1.5%
Black - 1.4%
White - 1.3%
Asian - 1.0%"
If we take non-white/non-Asian populations to be more likely to be living in poverty, that probably answers the question:
https://federalsafetynet.com/poverty-statistics/
"Poverty Rate
Black - 19.5%
Hispanic, any race - 17.1%
Asian - 9.3%
White, not Hispanic - 8.1%"
Another source gives it as:
"https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
Timeframe: 2021
White 9.50%
Asian/Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander 10.20%
Multiple Races 14.10%
Hispanic 17.60%
Black 21.70%
American Indian/Alaska Native 25.90%"
Thank you for posting all that!
>Presumably being in foster care means coming from homes and families with problems
Isn't it possible that the "problem" is the parents don't like the kid because of their sexuality?
It is fairly hard to get taken into care (at least from what I've seen of it, in places where my immediate reaction was "this family is so dysfunctional, even the crappy care system would be better" but social workers operate (now?) on "keep the family together as much as possible".
So if the situation was that the kid was in danger because of their family's attitude to them being gay or whatever, they might be taken into care. But not just because the parents don't approve/accept, and especially if the family is otherwise better off (e.g. middle-class).
Although that might be changing; refusal to accept/validate LGBT identity might be classed as emotional abuse:
https://www.verywellfamily.com/top-reasons-children-enter-foster-care-27123
"Neglect: Neglect encompasses several areas, including not fulfilling a child's needs for food, a clean living environment, or emotional well-being. It is extremely difficult to prove emotional abuse but it often plays a part in physical and sexual abuse."
https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2017.pdf
"CHILD MALTREATMENT: The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA)
definition of child abuse and neglect is, at a minimum: Any recent act or failure to act on
the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm,
sexual abuse or exploitation; or an act or failure to act, which presents an imminent risk of
serious harm.
MALTREATMENT TYPE: A particular form of child maltreatment that received a CPS
response. Types include medical neglect, neglect or deprivation of necessities, physical abuse,
psychological or emotional maltreatment, sexual abuse, and other forms included in state law.
NCANDS conducts analyses on maltreatments that received a disposition of substantiated or
indicated.
PSYCHOLOGICAL OR EMOTIONAL MALTREATMENT: Acts or omissions—other
than physical abuse or sexual abuse—that caused or could have caused—conduct, cognitive,
affective, or other behavioral or mental disorders. Frequently occurs as verbal abuse or excessive demands on a child’s performance."
"Psychological or emotional maltreatment" is only a small percentage of CPA investigations, at least by 2017 report data:
Table 3–10 Maltreatment Type Combinations, 2017
MALTREATMENT TYPE COMBINATIONS Maltreatment Type Maltreatment Type Percent
SINGLE TYPE - -
Neglect includes Medical Neglect 422,334 62.7
Other/Unknown 19,539 2.9
Physical Abuse 74,195 11.0
Psychological or Emotional Maltreatment 15,476 2.3
Sexual Abuse 44,951 6.7
Total Single Type 576,495 85.6
TWO TYPES - -
Neglect and "Other"/Unknown 25,195 3.7
Neglect and Physical Abuse 35,018 5.2
Neglect and Psychological Maltreatment1 12,825 1.9
Neglect and Sexual Abuse 9,245 1.4
Physical Abuse and "Other"/Unknown 614 0.1
Physical Abuse and Psychological Maltreatment 5,684 0.8
Physical Abuse and Sexual Abuse 1,498 0.2
Sexual Abuse and Psychological Maltreatment 416 0.1
Total Two Types 90,495 13.4
THREE TYPES - -
Neglect, Physical Abuse, and Psychological Maltreatment 3,390 0.5
Neglect, Physical Abuse, and "Other"/Unknown 1,273 0.2
Neglect, Physical Abuse, and Sexual Abuse 1,002 0.1
Total Three Types 5,665 0.8
REMAINING COMBINATIONS 1,175 0.2
NATIONAL 673,830 100.0"
So "my parents don't like it that I'm gay" on its own would need to be very severe and even there it seems to be an extremely minor rate as compared to other instances of neglect. If the parents are beating and physically neglecting the child's needs, then it is something more urgent to be investigated, but if it's "Mom cries about and Dad says he never expected this" then it's not enough.
That's a good question. I agree that "rate of being raised in poverty" is not at all the same as "rate of living in poverty", especially for a population like that. I remember seeing something on UK data but I could not find it. Curiously, on US data, I could not find a clear study either. A lot of studies are clearly non-representative. There is probably an answer in private data of https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/hsls09/ .
There is however a hint at the answer in columns 4 and 5 of Table 4 in this article https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775719302791 Basically, it says that trans children rate of obtaining a high school diploma is lower than that of cis children (column 4) but that penalty halves once one adjusts for family socio-economic factors (column 5). Penalty decrease on the adjustment means that trans children in this study on average come from lower status families. I do not think that this is an entirely satisfactory answer to your question though.
Either way, all this data points in the direction of transgendered people being on average lower SES than I assumed, and I'll adjust my picture accordingly. Thanks for posting it!
The basic question is: what in the parents' status, education, living place, specific way they care about their children's wellbeing, you name it ... affects whether the child goes to public/private/religious school or is homeschooled/ unschooled. All of those things could directly affect the outcomes we see here (life satisfaction, being poorer or richer, ...).
I find the results interesting to read, and I don't disagree with Scott's conclusions. I think this type of presentations tempts to read more into those numbers than they actually tell you. Well, maybe ACX readers are exceptionally good at resisting such temptation?
Hm, sorry. Kind of.
The main problem here is that while most American public schools are similar, each home school is very different. It seems wrong to try to make a cohesive group out of homeschoolers.
That's not how statistics and demographics work. The fact that one group has greater variance than a second doesn't mean you can't compare the groups.
Groups can be meaningfully studied in aggregate, even if they can also be meaningfully studied in subsets.
I think the problem isn't exactly variance. I think there are distinct sub-groups within the homeschooling community so this is a bit like comparing stats for, say, lions vs a collection of "sheep, giraffes, snakes and humans." The average height for lions makes sense. The average height for the collection can be computed but doesn't make as much sense.
I agree with this. At minimum, there's a pretty big distinction between religious and secular homeschooling families. In the US, the religious homeschoolers are the majority (I don't know how much Covid shifted that).
American public schools can be very different depending on how affluent the area is.
Yep. You can kind of see that in this data:
Here’s where members of each social class said they went to school:
...
Rich: 42% public, 0% home, 16% religious, 39% private
I was raised upper middle class in a very rich area and went to one of the best public schools in the country. The area also has some of the best private schools in the country. In terms of the quality there was little difference between public and private so the decision families made were mostly about signaling or similar social things.
How do you differentiate between home schooling and "unschooling but encouraged to learn unstructured"? It seems more like different pedagogies than different categories. And if you are truly unschooled i.e. no one bothered to give you an education, and you couldn't avail yourself to the public option, I would tend to assume a broken home...
Unstructured learning does sound interesting for some kind of students (highly intelligent AND highly curious AND highly self disciplined and possibly adverse to standard socialisation) but highly dangerous for the rest of us, even the weirdos/nerds amongst us. I know there's no way I would have put myself through any kind of complex scientific topic if I hadn't been forced to.
OTOH, it's not like my career or hobbies really involve or necessitate lots of scientific knowledge...
As someone who was homeschooled and some people have described as unschooled, I agree that the distinction is too fuzzy to throw out for self categorization. And it is trendy enough that two people receiving the same schooling might describe their schooling as either depending on when they grew up.
Unstructured means without a curriculum? Not 5 days a week? Without the parent ever telling the kid anything? Not push someone do something that is effectively educational when they didn't want to do it?
What if a textbook was used once or twice for math, but never for English, half unschooled?
Unschooled, at least as I use the term, means that nobody required you to learn particular things in particular ways. So no curriculum. Not 5 days a week. With parents telling the kids lots of things and the kids free to get interested in those things and pursue them or not. A textbook used if the kid wants, possibly suggested by a parent.
In our case the only pushing was nagging the kids to learn the multiplication tables. Our now adult daughter thinks that was a mistake.
But a lot of parents fall in to a gray area in between. No curriculum, not 5 days a week, but yes on this road trip we're talking about spelling. Or "it's time to learn X now" (and stopping if there was a legitimate complaint). Or "Hey, look at this cool theater group" pushing-but-not-forcing moving into "You've started so you must finish X period out, you committed to it in the beginning."
Among people with a school background, a lot of people would look at that as unschooling. Among unschoolers (in my area) they would look at that as homeschooling.
Then there are the people who take their kids out of school, but send them to learning centers / co-ops 5 days a week for 5-8 hours/day. They were part of homeschooling groups in my area, but the people who actually did education at home would not describe them as homeschoolers.
Loose coalition, fuzzy boundaries.
We certainly did a lot of getting our kids interested in things. My wife and I alternated who put which kid to bed, spent about half an hour doing it, and talked with them. That included my reciting poetry, my wife singing, my making up algebra puzzles — two equations in two unknowns rigged to have integer solutions, for the kid to do in his head—making up stories and telling them. We talked about things.
But except for the multiplication tables, it was all a matter of getting the kids interested in something and then helping them explore it. I made some attempt to get them interested in math, but with little success. They finally taught themselves what was needed to do well on the math SAT because they wanted to get into good colleges.
On the other hand, both of them know a lot of poetry, my son is trying to be a novelist and my daughter is an online free lance editor, mainly of fantasy.
What do your children wish you'd done instead?
Not nagged her into learning the multiplication tables (I don't know if my son agrees or not).
Wow, I thought it was the opposite!
"And if you are truly unschooled i.e. no one bothered to give you an education, and you couldn't avail yourself to the public option, I would tend to assume a broken home..."
Unschooling doesn't mean that nobody bothered to help you get educated, it means that nobody forced you to learn the particular things he wanted you to learn at the times and in the ways that he preferred.
Your statement is like saying that if kids are not force fed they will starve to death.
I understood and I'm arguing that's more like "home schooled but with a different pedagogy"...
We "unschooled" though there are various reasons why I resist the term, but David's description of it is the same I would use. In the homeschooling world, there are parents who neglect their children. I think it's better to call that neglect. Unschooling is its own pedagogy and unschooling is a good term for it.
As a side note, I want to clarify the reason I resist the term has to do with who the prominent voices were in unschooling near us while we were doing it and not wanting to be associated with people I found to be rude, dogmatic a**holes. Not because I think there's anything wrong with the term.
I did a quick ordinal regression looking at school satisfaction predicted by schooling * childhood class. I dropped unschooling due to low n across class categories, and similarly combined "rich" and "upper middle" for the same reason.
Childhood social class had a strong and consistent effect on school satisfaction, with OR of 1.69 for the second lowest social class category compared to the lowest, 2.56 for the next highest compared to the lowest and 3.31 for the highest compared to the lowest. All significant to p<0.001.
For school category, there was a "borderline significant" difference between home schooling compared to public schooling OR=3.01, p=0.56. Neither of the other two comparisons were close to significant, though trended in the direction of both being higher than public schooling (but the confidence intervals were extremely wide i.e. OR=0.69-3.6 for religious vs public school.
Was that a typo? p=0.056 could be described as "borderline significant", p=0.56 not.
Good catch. Yes, it was a typo. p=0.056. 95% CI (0.946-9.18). So very wide, but only just crossing 1.
What is the "school satisfaction" variable in the dataset that you used for the RHS variable? I'm looking at the 'ACXSPublic2022.csv' posted but not seeing the school satisfaction variable.
This is all based on 2020 data, not 2022.
The average age was about 30, which is very similar to the average age from the 2014 survey (29) from 9 years ago. So it looks like the readers aren't ageing along with blog. Which suggest people tend to loose interest over their 30s and get replaced with new readers in their 20s. It definitely seems like this blog is a thing that specifically-guys-in-their-late-twenties enjoy.
It's reinforcing my suspicion that curiosity/mental acuity peaks around age 30 and drops off pretty strongly afterwards. It's when a lot of the great physicists/mathematicians made their discoveries (Newton, Einstein etc. Scott himself?).
I'd like to ask the 40 year old guys why they lost interest, but I guess they're not around to answer.
Have any older guys who do still read the blog experienced anything like a loss in intellectualism/curiosity?
Late 30s guy here, have been reading Scott since the Squid314 days, was an avid reader and /r/ssc participator a decade ago.
I think a big part of it for me is that I just don't have the same amount of free time to be spending on the Internet. In 2013 I was in my late 20s, partnered but living alone, and was in the early stage of my academic career.
Now in 2023 I'm in my late 30s, married with a young kid, and my academic career has progressed to the point that I'm in charge of a bunch of stuff (lecturing, supervising grad students, faculty admin nonsense, etc).
Subjectively it feels like my intellectual curiosity is still as vigorous as ever, but I just don't have the time (or inclination) to be part of an internet community anymore.
Also, not to demean Scott, but from my perspective the blog has gotten a little less interesting with time. I feel like between 2013-2016 almost every post provided fascinating reading that opened my eyes to new ways of thinking. These days I'm much more likely to find articles less interesting (I don't really care about prediction markets or crypto, for example, which are some of Scott's major interests these days). Again, nothing against Scott: he's still one of the best essayists in the world, in my opinion. It's just that his interests and mine have drifted apart a little over the years.
I'm ~50, remain very curious, and read broadly. I think the blog covers less-interesting subjects more frequently, as you state, but I also think the quality is decreasing in the last year or so. I'm patiently waiting to see if it is a monotonic trend.
~60, no dropoff. Possible confounds: no kids; profession that encourages curiosity.
77. Spend much less time on ACX than I did on SSC but a fair amount on DSL, which I find on average more interesting.
Late 50s woman here, no dropoff, have been a reader here for ... is over a decade possible at this point? I'm more or less the opposite demographic of the majority readership here, except that I'm also a smart nerdy person.
I find this space as interesting as I did from the beginning. My capacity for it rises and falls but I don't feel like there's been any decline in quality of posts.
What’s DSL?
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php
What my wife referred to early on as the refugee forum. It was started after SSC shut down and before ACX existed by and for the SSC commenting community, and is still running. I like the forum format, since it makes it easy to follow threads that interest me and ignore ones that don't.
I think the posting community has more libertarians than here and some conservatives, so I get to listen to conservative positions held by intelligent people, which is an interesting perspective. One recent thread was started by a Spanish (Basque) lady who said she agreed with the Catholic church about everything except the existence of God.
Do we know that readers are losing interest in their 30s? If readership were growing and new readers were typically younger (which seems plausible), then average age could remain static or decline, even if no readers were leaving.
I think the growth rate would have needed to have been really high and continuous for that maths to work out. And it'd still be notable that the new readers were overwhelming younger guys.
From discussions Scott has had about moving to ACX, I think this may in fact be true? As with all such situations, there's likely a number of readers who drop out as well, which would tend to be older (since the reverse is impossible - you can't stop reading at a younger age than you started!).
This does mean that new readers are overwhelmingly younger, which seems true in either case with some range in how young and how many depending on working theory.
I'm in my 50s. I don't think my level of intellectual curiosity has changed much over the years, though I am of course slightly stupider, and have less energy and free time, than when I was say 25.
I'm not too far over the average yet, so it might be too early for me to speculate, but:
Reading this blog is easy enough that I don't see myself aging out of it. On the other hand, filling out surveys? It's very tempting to say "I've filled out this survey for the past N years. It takes forever. I'm really busy right now. Maybe next year?"
I did that this year.
I'm a little shocked that at 42 I'm 10+ years older than the average reader, although the survey is from Jan 2020 so possibly less now. (And I wasn't a regular reader until the Substack appeared, so I doubt I even took the survey myself.)
Certainly with two kids I have less time for deep thinking and/or internet communities, but frankly I'm not sure how much time I ever spent on that compared to, like, computer games.
Readers who took the poll.
I'm in my mid-30s. Opened the poll. Had to walk away for kid. Almost forgot to finish it. I also often read the blog in batches every few weeks; sometimes I have a substack Tuesday morning or whatever where I catch up for a few hours. I bet there's a lot of that going on. Maybe fewer readers, but definitely fewer pollees.
Woman approaching 40. Still curious, just have 2 small children. I’ve given up a lot of pursuits to raise my kids- there just isn’t time. But reading this blog and hosting meetups are vital intellectual outlets for me in this period. Which won’t last forever; once my kids are older I hope to return to my own writing in a more focused way.
Not directly on topic, but I was surprised how old the readership was. I'm 19 and I expected the average reader to be maybe 25 or a little older. I guess the average reader is actually quite similar to Scott.
I'm 30; I've been a reader of the blog for almost 10 years now. I still currently read every article, but I'm going to have my first kid in a few months and I would not be surprised if I simply didn't have time to read after that....
Funny enough, the first few months after having the kid you often have a lot of time to read. Especially if they have a tendency to fall asleep on you (like mine did). The difficulty there is having any brain power to understand what you're reading.
I can't speak to trends with respect to Scott's blog, but with respect to the larger question, I would say my pure intellectual curiousity is at least as strong now as at any time before. However, it's different, viz.:
In my teens and 20s, a fair amount of my intellectual curiousity could, in retrospect, be better labeled as a drive to become more attractive to women. That is, I learned skills and knowledge more so that I could attract the kind of girl I found interesting. Stuff like how to fix things, or be knowledgeable about the world and its ways, or do well at predicting the short-term future, or be qualified for a highly-paid high-status job. I would be interested in stuff that was cool and hip or maybe edgy, which brought me social status or influence, but less so in stuff that was discouraging or ugly (e.g. practical end of life issues) or which had no social glamor at all.
Through most of middle age, as a parent and early to mid-career, my interests became a lot more focussed and practical. I viewed a fair amount of the stuff that fascinated me in my 20s as intellectual wankery, which was of no practical importance, or which turned out to have been discussed to death by ages of men before me, and I just needed to discover that I wasn't the only one to think of them. I became interested in practical stuff like how you find good schools, how you deal with rebellious teens, how to make your way through a social heirarchy with which you may not entirely agree but which, practically speaking, governs you life -- rejecting as delusional the notion of youth that it could, or would, be remade better within my lifetime. I got interested in the basics of personal finance and family economics, the practical lessons that let a marriage succeed as a working partnership and not so much a sexual adventure cruise. I became a lot less interested in speculative fiction (seeing it more often as self-induglent narcissism, and less original than I had thought when I was wet behind the ears), and more interested in biography and history, the stories of real people struggling with practical problems.
In late middle age to early old age, with most of the practical issues of my life settled, one way or the other, I find my curiousity has become less practical but also not recovered its youthful shotgun nature -- roughly, any thing that uses big words or complex math must be cool -- and tends to be more pure and more focussed on existential issues. How do we find meaning in life, given the certainty of death? How do we truly understand people who are quite different from us? What is the true meaning of friendship or of kinship? What is really worth saying or learning, or practicing, because it makes life worthwhile even if it brings no social advantage, no valuable social interaction -- something that would be valuable even on a desert isle? With the perspective of decades, what can be noticed about those who come after us, younger, and what is useful and valuable to convey to them, or learn from them? What can be noticed about those who came before us, as they march steadily into the forever night -- what should we ask them, before it's too late? What should we convey or learn from them? And, in both directions, what can be noticed as eternally true about the progression of the human soul from cradle to grave, and what does it mean about our nature, and our relationship to God (or whatever locus of meaning one wishes to keep central)? I say it's more "pure" because I don't really care at all whether anyone else is interested in the problem, and I don't have any strong motivation to share what I think with others -- I'm a pure "student" with no idea of becoming a "teacher".
When I was much younger, I prized new experiences and new ideas -- climbing McKinley, learning general relativity or the tango, meeting new people. Now I tend to prize deepening my understanding of people, and mostly people I know. What new understanding can I gain of my mother and father, as I approach ages myself when as a kid I considered them "old people?" What new understanding can I gain of my children, as they approach ages when I considered myself all grown up? How can I understand more deeply what it's like to be this friend or that acquaintance?
I don't think I would characterize any one stage as better than the one before or afterward, or say overall there was a general advancement. It feels more like to every thing there is a season, and the seasons of life correspond to different types of curiosity, and curiosity about different things.
Isn't the average age for this 2020 survey closer to 33.5?
The average age increased by 4.5 years over 6 years.
I’m in my thirties, and I’m actually surprised today I don’t remember my SAT scores at all. Or even the GRE. I’m pretty sure I remembered them for years after, but at some point they vanished. Do me a favor and look at the most recent survey for people who left the SAT question blank, and maybe you can find the average age we forget at…
Until I took the survey I would have sworn I knew my SAT scores, but I do not. Seconding this.
I'd like Scott to include the option for ACT scores in the future, I have to think a sizeable chunk of midwestern readers took that but never the SAT. Let me brag about my perfect reading score on an anonymous internet survey, I'm begging you.
I mean, I forgot my scores too (I'm 33). I just happen to still have them in a file somewhere for reference.
I had also forgotten my scores (and somehow only had recorded in my notes the combined CR+M (1600) score), so I went to retrieve my scores from College Board. What a wild goose chase.
I last took the test in 2015, so I still have my login. But in the interim, College Board switched login systems (previously they used a username, now an email is required) so I have to re-enroll my account. All my information is accurate on the account, so it’s the right one, but my scores aren’t there. There’s a “Score Match” tool for looking up old results, but the second field is a dropdown with test dates only going back through the beginning of 2022.
I eventually found a scholarship form I filled out in high school that had the information.
I had a similar experience. Wound up getting the results spreadsheet from the *last* survey and filtering it to find my own entry. No idea how I found it the first time.
I'm kind of surprised how many people could still access their scores after so long. Maybe part of the selection effect is that you're more likely to remember a more impressive score?
Yeah this was the first of these surveys i couldn't quickly remember. I am in my thirties as well. I could remember my total score but had to work out the components.
I'm pretty sure I put my scores down in 2020's survey, but could not remember them for the 2023.
Need the confidence interval, Scott. Or at least the standard dev.
Right. Take the sqrt of the number in each category, and make that a +/- percentage. For only 16 people is some category the random uncertainty is large. 16 +/- 4.
I'm admiring that I managed to take three of those five options. Four if you want to stretch Unschooling beyond reason.
> Yes, these are the averages of hundreds or thousands of SAT scores in each cell. I *told you* that you were heavily-selected and weird. Given the level of selection effects, I’m not sure we can conclude much here.
I should call out another selection effect in those scores that is only obvious if you're familiar with SAT scores.
The SAT-math is much easier than the SAT verbal. Accordingly, a score of X doesn't mean the same thing on the math that it does on the verbal - it's more impressive as a verbal score than it is as a math score.
But the average SSC SAT scores are significantly higher on the verbal side than they are on the math side. This is not expected; a typical population would have equal ability on both sides, which would translate to the math scores being higher than the verbal scores. SSC readers appear to be noticeably bad at math (given their high IQs).
(The scores also provide strong support for the theory that school has little effect on verbal performance at the same time that it has a pronounced effect on mathematical performance.)
That's what I noticed. That math scores went down for home schooling and tanked for unschooling strongly implies that math is more learned than verbal is, since verbal scores were much more consistent.
> strongly implies that math is more learned than verbal is
I wouldn't draw that inference. Verbal SAT questions are thoroughly "learned"; this isn't Raven's Progressive Matrices. The characterization I've seen, which seems right to me, is that if you don't make kids read in school, they'll go ahead and read independently (resulting in essentially the same performance, because they trained themselves), whereas if you don't make kids do math in school, they mostly won't do math on their own time, and the result is performance substantially below where they would have been had they been forced into doing more math.
Think of it this way: kids will naturally provide enough verbal self-training to reach the saturation point where additional training has almost no effect, but they provide much less math self-training than that.
The implication of my model is that providing more math in school is likely to quickly hit ceilings, but providing less math in school _will_ cause math scores to drop. (Whereas providing more reading in school is also likely to hit ceilings, but providing less reading in school will quickly hit floors.)
> SSC readers appear to be noticeably bad at math (given their high IQs).
Or "noticeably good at verbal stuff, given their IQ" works too!
That is interesting and quite surprising I think, I would have expected the reverse. Perhaps the blog form attract people comparatively more interested in "verbal things"?
Why would you have expected the reverse? It's a very wordy blog...
> Or "noticeably good at verbal stuff, given their IQ" works too!
That's true. If 5 is low compared to 50, then 50 is also high compared to 5.
There is a related observation you can make about the general relationship between mathematical and verbal ability. A "flat" profile is defined by reference to a European white population, but worldwide there are two different profiles and no particular reason to think of one as being more Platonically flat than the other one. Taking "flat" as the psychometric 'shape' of whites, blacks are also flat. But East Asians and Amerindians show much stronger spatial than verbal ability (relative to the "flat" shape).
Asians are high performers and they are generally thought of as being "strong" in math as opposed to "remarkably weak with words given their high math scores". It might be interesting to see if low-performing Amerinds are thought of as being "extra weak verbally", "showing a much smaller deficit than expected" in math, or if discussions of them mostly just ignore the phenomenon.
Anyway, the reported SAT scores show that the psychometric profile of SSC readers does not match the normal profile of the population they're drawn from (even restricting the source population to the high end); it is biased toward verbal ability relative to mathematical ability.
Or SSC is just exceptionally difficult to read and thus attracts people high in verbal SAT. I like to read some quite challenging books for fun (Gravity's Rainbow, Bible, Silmarillion) for fun, and there are some SSC posts which are so dense I didn't read them in one piece (meditations on moloch).
I never found SSC as dense as Gravity's Rainbow, but I first tried reading the latter in high school and maybe this means I should try again.
The big postmodern tomes like Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Infinite Jest are still a clear cut above SSC, but if you can read SSC for pleasure you can read those aswell.
> Silmarillion
That one's an interesting case. I read it mostly because that seemed like the type of thing I should do, and reading it is a pain. But I noticed that people really liked being told the stories from the Silmarillion, once I'd read it. It seems to be a case where the plotting is very good and the writing quality is terrible.
It'd be very interesting to see what Neil Gaiman would produce if he were to rewrite the Silmarillion.
Is that at all surprising, given the Silmarillion is all unpublished drafts? the core plot is done first, but polished beautiful writing takes many rounds of editing
Well, I wouldn't claim that my impromptu oral rendition of stories from the Silmarillion was particularly polished. So the writing quality appears to be *below* the basic level you'd get by just writing down whatever came into your head; work has gone into making the text unreadable.
I think there are good reasons for that - the text is supposed to be reference material supporting the story of The Lord of the Rings, and so that "unreadability" work pays dividends elsewhere in things like self-consistency over a long text describing a very wide set of events, in storing the information in a compact form, and probably in organizing it such that it's easier to find material that you know you're looking for. But it's worth remarking on the phenomenon anyway.
Actually I think this is one of the few educational differences that shows up consistently across different surveys of homeschoolers. They are a little better on verbal measures and a little worse on math.
Does age at taking the SAT have the same effect? For example the first time I took it (age 13 or 14) my verbal was higher than math, but the last time I took it (age 16) my verbal was still higher but math was a lot closer. Then I took the GRE (age 25) and my math score was finally higher (but still a lower percentile).
(homeschooled, for reference)
I am not aware of such an effect, nor am I aware of any particular result saying it shouldn't happen. My default assumption would be that performance in everything rises over time (until you reach the age at which the SAT is targeted); I would be more interested in percentile-to-percentile comparisons than in score-to-score ones. Scores are worse-defined than percentiles are.
If you want to look at how scores develop as the subject ages, I can provide my own:
Age 12: 720 V, 630 M. I don't have the score sheet any more, so I'm not sure what percentiles those were. The verbal score, but not the math score, qualified me for SET due to being a score that exceeded 700 below the age of 13.
Age 13: 790 V: 710 M. In "points", math has caught up a bit, behind by only 80 instead of 90. The gap is very wide, though; the math score is 95th percentile and the verbal is 99+. Once again, the verbal score qualified for SET (it exceeded 700 by 10 points for every month over the age of 13), and the math score didn't.
Age (probably) 16, PSAT: 80 V, 78 M. PSAT scores are, for no particular reason, SAT scores divided by 10.
Age (probably) 17, SAT: 800 V, 780 M.
Age (certainly) 17: 800 V, 800 M.
I only have the scoresheet for that final one. It seems pretty clear that the 780 represents my true ability and I got lucky the third time around. 800 verbal and math are both reported as "99th" percentile, but the verbal score is certainly 99+ and rarer than the math score. There is also a note on the score sheet that suggests most 800s are due to good luck: "On average, a person with a verbal score of 800 loses 53 points on a second testing. [...] On average, a person with a math score of 800 loses 49 points on a second testing." (Or, of course, people retaking might be systematically different than people only taking the test once. I wouldn't expect retakers to be biased toward people whose first score was obviously too high, though.)
Age 23, GRE: 750 V, 780 M. Here the math score is higher by 30 "points", but yet again points don't mean anything. The verbal score is reported as 99th percentile (still probably 99+, but this is less of a sure thing than the SAT score) and the math score is 89th percentile.
My default assumption is that most of what's happening between the SAT and the GRE is that more-or-less identical performance is being scored differently and then compared to a very different group of people. The difference between SAT at age 12 and SAT at age 17 is probably more reflective of acquisition of knowledge by me. But verbal ability is much stronger than math ability every time they are reported accurately enough to tell the difference; that never changed.
"The SAT-math is much easier than the SAT verbal. "
really? I'd always thought the opposite was true. That's a really strange result then.
I have never heard that math is easier than verbal; however, the a large amount of the math portion can be made easier by knowing the the patterns of questions they use and the tricks to answer those questions (or at least narrow down the choices). There are few of these tricks with verbal.
In the website below "The average Math score is 528, and the average Evidence-Based Reading and Writing score is 531." If that is true it does not seem obvious that math scores are higher.
https://www.testgeek.com/sat-scores-guide.html
But this https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings seems to suggest that the OP might be correct at the upper tail of the distribution: 750 seems to be 95th percentile for math but 98th percentile for verbal.
Oh yes you are right, I forgot that the values are absolutely not around the mean.
My prior is it is easier to each or optimally hone verbal skills in a homeschooling/unstructured setting than it is math skills, especially when the math skills are tested under pressure and requiring attention to detail (e.g. you solve for x, the question asks "what's x+5").
For verbal skills, you develop that by a lot of reading, which can be very self-directed. For math, there are those who will do any amount of math for fun, but a lot of times you have to drill it, until you're factoring, managing fractions, etc. Automatically and not having to think about it every time.
I suspect whatever curriculum one follows, without one's own dedication to seeing it through, a good curriculum, and one's own comfort with the topic, a homeschooling parent might not emphasize drilling the algebra-level and geometry that you need for the SAT math to be easy.
I was homeschooled and agree with this. My mom was my primary teacher, and was not very strong on math. For verbal this was fine because I read a lot, between self-selected and curriculum. For math it's a lot harder to just read and understand - though our math books did a decent job of explaining what was going on. I think around 9th or 10th I felt like I was losing track of how math worked (since it's built on previous levels that I understood but not great), and struggled to go through Trig and Physics. I did fine on Algebra and most things in Geometry. We found some tutors through a homeschooling support group that helped, but it was infrequent compared to daily learning of the verbal side.
This is surprising, since when I asked people if they were more STEM (1) or more humanities (5), the average was towards STEM (2.2). Also, between a third and half of respondents are programmers or other computer workers.
Is skilled computer programming correlated with strong verbal skills? Lots of memorizing definitions, syntax, skimming over a document and extracting key points? Then the language-oriented skills gets co-opted by culture into being defined as STEM?
There is probably an XKCD about this.
But they are also STEMish people and programmers who read your blog about concepts, big ideas, history, psychiatry... So not so surprising that they are more verbally inclined than the average STEM person. And it might not be a coincidence that this is also, I suppose, your profile?
I'm not sure what the surprise is. I am part of the subset you appear to be talking about - significantly stronger verbal skills than math skills, but with a pronounced personality inclination toward working with math and computers compared to words and people.
I don't think much of "STEM" as a differentiator. It feels to me like mathematicans and programmers have more in common with historians and philosophers -- other "big ideas and what do they imply?" people -- than with people steeped in empirical study of cold reality, e.g. aero/astro engineers or med chemists. I would distinguish the theoreticians from the experimentalists, that is, and think the theoreticians have more in common with the humanities people than with the experimentalists.
The experimentalists in turn have more in common with people in very practical occupations, like farmers, police and surgeons, truck drivers, machinists. I can readily see a truck driver getting really into the chemistry of combustion, say, or a mechanical engineer building and learning to fly an ultralight as a hobby. Similarly, I can see a mathematician or programmer being deeply interested in philosophy or history, or a mathematician or philosopher becoming a programmer.
Mathematicians, programmers, engineers, and chemists all have the thing where the answers they propose will either be correct/workable, or *proven* false/unworkable. Historians and philosophers never have to face that music, which changes their field enormously.
This is as you note a point in common with a lot of blue-collar work; the years spent in academia is the differentiator there.
I agree it's not entirely clearcut, and to be more useful one would have to color in a lot of gray areas, but I don't fully agree with you. What determines "correct" seems to me quite different in both areas. For a chemist or mechanical engineer (or farmer), "correct" is determined by Mother Nature: the synthesis produces the right molecule, or it doesn't. The airplane flies or crashes. The crop is good or it fails.
For mathematicians and programmers, "correct" is determined by a system of rules that are invented by human beings. Your math is correct if it is consistent with the axioms of mathematics. Your program is correct if it is consistent with the rules of the programming language, the operating system, the underlying instruction set (and of course if it achieves what you wanted it to achieve).
I think there is a subtle but important difference here. The correctness according to rules and mechanisms we humans have invented is something that can be finally determined, generally. You can know whether a program is correct or not with 100% certainty (if you pursue it with sufficient effort). There are definitely undecideable propositions in math, but these are in some sense known to arise from the rules of math we have constructed. And if you stay outside those areas, I think generally your math is going to be either definitely correct or definitely wrong.
Human rules are also subject to human revision, e.g. one can draw conclusions about geometry that are "wrong" according to Euclid, but then along comes Riemann and we broaden the axioms and you can be right instead. We can change the rules of programming, so not declaring the type of your variable isn't wrong any more, or we can change an operating system or the underlying silicon so what was an error before becomes OK.
But when correctness is determined by Nature, it is first of all not always possible to finally determine correctness. Maybe the synthesis worked by accident, or for reasons you don't understand. Maybe the crop came in or failed by luck, and had nothing to do with your decisions. And also, the rules cannot be changed by any amount of human creativity or will. We can't broaden the definition of "flight" to include "the wings snap off and the fuselage plummets to Earth -- but in an unusually elegant and interesting swoop."
Another way to put it is that the structure within which you must work as a mathematician, programmer, historian, philosopher, lawyer, or linguist is that which humans have created themselves. But if you're an engineer, a physicist, chemist, biologist, farmer, machinist, et cetera, you have to work within a structure that was *not* created by humans -- it arose from Nature, is completely unresponsive to our wishes to change it, and we must discover it.
An important gray area is of course that as a practical matter even practical professions have to work within human structure -- farmers must cope with the law and economics, physicists have to use math, engineers must work within economics and law. And on the other side, we humans can and do often set up systems the full nature of which we don't know at the time we beget them, and so working within those systems there is a certain amount of empirical discovery that does take place: programmers can explore the consequences of a new language by experiment, lawyers can discover new penumbras and emanations, linguists can discover new ways in which language evolves in surprising ways.
But it still feels like the underlying distinction is sufficiently important that it helps group people better by attitudes they acquire by the nature of their work, e.g. how skeptical they are about novelty[1], than saying everyone who masters mathy stuff belongs in one camp, and everyone who recognizes a Cicero or Shakespeare quote belongs in another.
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[1] I'm reminded of the tale about Edison, who supposedly said after some iteration of an invention "all right boys, let's start her up and see why she doesn't work."
> For mathematicians and programmers, "correct" is determined by a system of rules that are invented by human beings. Your math is correct if it is consistent with the axioms of mathematics. Your program is correct if it is consistent with the rules of the programming language, the operating system, the underlying instruction set (and of course if it achieves what you wanted it to achieve).
That is absolutely not how programmers think about correctness. If it's consistent with the rules, your program will compile and run without indicating that it is in crisis. (It may also do that if it isn't consistent with the rules. But in that case, we complain about the misbehavior.) But being consistent with the rules is completely unrelated to whether it achieves anything at all; the only thing that counts is whether the program does what you want it to do.
Programming is a subfield of math (particularly the aspect of math that is interested in questions like 'how many logical operators do I need to postulate in order to be able to assemble everything else I want from them? One? OK, but NAND is the worst operator in the world, what if I go ahead and use two?'), but programmers are often terrible at math.
> You can know whether a program is correct or not with 100% certainty (if you pursue it with sufficient effort).
This is laughably false. The fact that this can't be done is one of the most famous results in computer science.
I am not sure that STEM is so much of a differentiator. Interests can diverge along many dimensions, as shown, for example, by the old but well-validated Holland's map of vocational and leisure interests (the RIASEC model).
If I understand you correctly, you are talking here about the experimental/practical versus intellectual/theoretical divide, which corresponds quite well to the Realistic/doing/things versus Investigative (ideas) dimensions of the RIASEC model. I also think that this blog selects for people with a high attraction to the Ideas dimension, and that this is not very highly correlated with STEM (although it is correlated with higher education, which is part of STEM).
The above distinction is about the kind of method/approach people like to use to study or work on their interests. But another dimension is the kind of things that people are interested in, and one of the main differentiators here is the People vs. Things dimension. It seems to me that this blog is much more concerned with things than people (probably atypical for a psychiatrist!), which correlates well with STEM interests.
My main takeaway is that effect size on everything is surprisingly low. Is it just that almost everybody rates life satisfaction in the same fairly narrow range? Due to hedonic treadmill etc.
Do we know that it's a narrow range since the values Scott gives are averages within each category? The bell curve of life satisfaction may be the same or different within each category of schooling and we wouldn't know, right?
Your relationship question doesn't seem to ask whether the person was EVER married or in a LTR, but a current status. I realise that considering the huge bias towards youthfulness of your population it is less important, but unless you controlled for that, your "singles" will include a substantial % of people who HAD a LTR which ended. For example, I'm a 52 years old widow after a 20+ years of marriage (likely rare but increasing in probability with age) and undoubtedly there will be many divorced people out there. So "not YET" married seems like an overstretch.
I wrote about our part-compelled, part-chosen entry into unschooling here: https://nickasbury.substack.com/p/the-opposite-of-school
It's a weird category because it's made up partly of families who chose it from the outset (therefore already social outliers), and partly of families whose children struggle in school (often because of traits that are bound to have other effects in life). It also covers children who are 'unschooled' at home and those who attend self-directed learning centres. Either way, I can only see the category growing in years to come – I'm very glad Scott is interested in it.
Very interesting thank you!
It makes total sense to me to unschool a child who has a bad time in school, but I am more surprised by the families for which this is a first choicce : I would expect that unschooling quite severly limit the type of job one can have, because it seems to me that the majority of jobs requiring "technichal" skills would be impossible. Or maybe unschooling is mostly for younger kids and they come back in high school for example?
My own kids are quite lazy and not very creative. I have got perfect confidence that if I unschool them they will only learn vido games skills, so I am probably quite biased here!
I think the term 'unschooling' probably leads to some misconceptions. 'Self-directed learning' is a better description – so it's certainly possible to sign up for courses in technical skills, or pursue advanced qualifications, even a PhD. But the motivation comes internally, and for the parents it's mainly about being a facilitator for the child's emerging interests. We deal with exactly what you'd expect – wall-to-wall Minecraft and YouTube. But he's also developed an intense interest in geography, history and politics, all of which would probably die instantly if he was doing it in a school setting. I wouldn't advocate it for everyone, but think it should be part of the mix on offer to every child.
It is wonderful that you found the right environment for your kid. I totally agree that it is an excellent solution for some kids, but probably not to all of them.
I realize that it is not clear to me what the legal aspects of unschooling are in the USA? Where I live (France) homeschool is possible but its has recently been made much more restrictive (you now need a reason, like health problem, or the kids has been bullied, etc.). And unschooling is not authorized.
Homeschooling in the US is regulated at the state level and what constitutes oversight of homeschooling families depends entirely on where a person lives that way.
I should add religious families were the leading edge in the US for the right to homeschool and because of our history of strong accommodation for religious minorities, our legal systems allow a lot of room for it. Hippies and other kinds of families road those coattails into the homeschooling space. I believe even the strictest states in the U.S. don't measure up to the most basic ways that other countries regulate homeschooling.
I dated a girl once in college who had been a literal and figurative underground homeschooler in Germany (where it was illegal, and the family, who was working overseas, would secretly do it in the basement).
Our unschooled son taught himself simple probability theory at about ten from a book (_How to Take a Chance_, by the same author and illustrator as _How to Lie with Statistics_, which both our kids liked), because he did role playing games and wanted to be able to calculate the odds of different outcomes. My grandson goes to a public school, but does computer programming at home for fun. So how technical or not the skills learned will depend very much on what the kid is interested in.
Your son is impressive! Did he stay unschooled all his childhood or did he go to highschool for example?
My impression was that many "technical" skills require a not particularly fun, not particularly interesting foundation. Like for engineering, you need reasonably good maths skills, which very few children learn for fun.
My son was unschooled until he went to college. He is currently trying to get established as a fiction author. His main academic interest is history.
I think a kid who really wanted to do engineering or physics or computer programming could push himself into learning the needed math. Neither of ours did. But our daughter wanted to learn a language, decided on Italian, took a college class over the summer and then continued over the year — the school I taught at let her could take courses without being enrolled as an undergraduate —and worked harder on that than I think I have ever worked at a college class. Similarly for harp, one of her other interests. In both cases, doing the work was entirely at her initiative, not ours.
Related to my second-generation homeschooler comment elsewhere in this post: is your grandson that goes to public school a child of one of the kids you unschooled? If so, do you mind sharing the reasoning for him going to public school?
I'd like to hear about that too.
Our homeschooled young adult kid says he's going to homeschool his kids but of course who knows?
No. He is the son of my first marriage, brought up mainly by my ex-wife and her husband, although he spent summers with us once he was old enough. He went to a suburban Pennsylvania public school.
I'd be very cautions about generalising school type across countries; implications of school type will differ a lot between the US and Europe (and probably even more outside the West).
For example, in the UK a lot of schools, including a big chunk of government schools, and more-or-less all private schools, are "religious" in theory, and to an American would look unacceptably religious - they have chapels and mandatory school prayer (all schools are legally obliged to have weekly collective worship in England and Wales). In practice, these should still be rounded off as secular schools for all intents and purposes, as no-one takes the religion seriously.
In Belgium, there are quasi-private schools paid for by vouchers that are fairly common, but private schools that you pay for are banned for Belgian citizens. Again, some of them are Catholic but this isn't terribly important.
Several countries also have varying degrees of technical school at the secondary education level which focus more on practical/trade skills than academic learning, although these are generally being phased out.
Anecdote 1. In my C.of E school, becoming a born again Christian was considered actually being Christian, unlike being C of E.to
Anecdote 2. In Belgium, I met a woman. who had cut off.contact with their British relatives because they had educated their children privately.
I do think there is still a difference between religious and non-religious schools in the UK. I went to a catholic state school in the UK and I had a clueless creationist science teacher who hadn’t even heard of nuclear fusion. She also thought that mirrors inverted left to right but not upside down, thought that planes stayed aloft due to the Bernoulli effect etc etc etc. I also had an RE teacher who taught us that contraceptive pills work by preventing the fertilised egg from implanting and a lot of PSHE lessons focused on persuading us not to have sex before marriage.
Wait, planes don't stay aloft due to the Bernoulli effect?
The Bernoulli effect happens, and planes stay aloft, and the two are not unconnected. It would be more correct to say that planes stay aloft because the air pressure below the wings is greater than the air pressure above the wings, which exerts a lifting force on the airplane (and, per Newton, pushes/pulls the air downwards). This happens because the shape and angle of the wing results in an asymmetric flow field with higher dynamic pressure below than above. At least, it does if the pilot arranged for the wing to be at the proper angle.
"Bernoulli effect" is a shorthand explanation that explains part of this. It doesn't explain why the air pressure below the wing is higher than ambient, and it handwaves away the question of why air flowing over the upper surface is moving faster than over the lower surface. But it's easy enough to explain in a few paragraphs and a diagram, and somehow out of several possible few-paragraphs-and-a-diagram explanations, it's the one that won out in the mid-20th-century "explain how an airplane flies without getting bogged down in the nerdy details" competition.
It's not completely wrong, but it is not complete.
The one that surprised me was that people who were unschooled were strongly less likely to be in a relationship. Any theories?
Most of the others seemed to imply that type of schooling didn't make much difference.
Only 35 people unschooled, I don't think you can draw to much from such a small sample size.
The hypothesis that came to mind at seeing that disparity for homeschooled and unschooled people was that for some people, school could be an additional social network that increases access to potential partners, directly or indirectly.
(That was also my thought for the low use of psychedelics.)
Agreed on both. As a homeschooler I had zero access to drugs of any kinds (that I was aware of), and also a smaller dating pool.
We had a support group that got together weekly, with about 70 kids K-12 at one point. My younger sister's cohort *heavily* married each other. My age group didn't work out very well for that, as with a small group even a few not being compatible strongly lowers the possibility of getting together.
They were also younger, right?
My impression is that the difference in results isn't significant enough to draw conclusions.
Growing up homeschooled in the US, we learned that there were two groups of non-conventionally-schooling families: hippies who didn't want their kids locked inside and forced to recite the Pledge and conform (cf. The Teenage Liberation Handbook), and Christians who didn't want their kids taught to believe in evolution (cf. the loudest group of homeschooling boosters these days, having switched from "evolution" to "woke gender BLM ideology"). These groups interact only at arms' length and have typical pedagogy and ideology differing from the conventional school system in opposite directions, so I'd expect pooling them before analysis to give confusing results.
This isn't exactly captured by homeschooling vs. unschooling (we were hippie homeschoolers), but could be captured pretty well in this dataset by rescoring each "ReligiousBackground" as "hippie" (e.g. Unitarian, atheist) or "trad" (e.g. Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness), and combining homeschooling with unschooling. I'd be interested in doing this and looking at satisfaction, SAT scores, and adult counterculturalism when it's not the middle of the workweek.
Yeah the other class of home schoolers I know are the anti-vax. Public schools here require your kids to be vaccinated.
I’d assume pretty significant overlap with the other two groups, assuming that is true.
In my experience that is true -- the vax issue is often the only thing shared by the religious and secular homeschoolers. But I would say the vaccine issue was not until Covid any kind of primary determinant of whether a family homeschools. Prior to Covid, almost all states in the U.S. had a religious exemption for kids who wanted to go to school and their parents didn't want to vaccinate them.
No this is pre-covid, in fact one of the anti(children) vaxers got the covid vax to feel safe going to visit their older parents. They are moms worried about their kids.
New York State. I've only got two data points in this group, semi religious/ spiritual, but really no more than most people I know.
Would intellectuals/ people who want to provide a better education for gifted/challenged children fall into the hippie camp or a new camp?
"Would intellectuals/ people who want to provide a better education for gifted/challenged children fall into the hippie camp or a new camp? "
I worked with a former Stanford STEM prof who was homeschooling. He thought that there was a 3rd category to cover this (and not just gifted/challenged children) so he uses a 3-bin categorization model. This bin is newer than the other two.
I'd say that's fair. My parents were intellectuals (Ivy-educated, had high academic goals for us), but clearly affiliated with the hippies socially and pedagogically. We sometimes had playdates with more tiger-parentish intellectual homeschoolers, the kind that were trying to train their kids to become chess grandmasters while using formal curricula to maintain strict grade-level competence in math and reading; these parents definitely avoided the creationists, but also had reservations about us wild forest children.
Okay, some preliminary results from lunch break. I sorted ReligiousBackground based on my knowledge of who is most likely to do religiously motivated homeschooling in the US, into "trad" (Catholic, Protestant, Traditional Chinese, Muslim, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness) or "hippie" (atheist, agnostic, Unitarian, different religions for each parent, Quaker, Baha'i, Jewish), and sorted Schooling into "home" (home or un) or "institutional" (public, private, or religious).
By these definitions, both hippie and trad homeschoolers in this dataset were more approving of their schooling than either hippie or trad institutional schoolers (6.9 and 6.9 vs 5.8 and 5.8). Hippie homeschoolers were most likely to be non-cis (trans or other; 8/35=23%), followed by trad homeschoolers (22/235=10%), hippie institutional schoolers (96/1490=8%), and trad institutionals (251/3214=6%). SAT math scores were 713±59 (hippie) and 694±68 (trad) for homeschoolers, 721±85 (hippie) and 713±81 (trad) for conventional; verbal scores were 761±25, 726±55, 723±81, and 716±75. These results are tracking my priors better than the original categorizations, so I'm interested in exploring them further when I have time.
Thanks for doing this! Interesting.
The SAT score stuff seems not indicative of anything given what an outlying sample this is that way.
What is the "approved of schooling" variable you used? I'm looking in the 'ACXSPublic2022.csv' dataset and not seeing it. Maybe I need to look in the excel file.
This is from the 2020 SSC survey linked at the top of the OP; it looks like Scott didn't ask about schooling in the 2022 survey. The question was "School Approval Rating: How much did you like your experience at primary and secondary school? 1=Did not like at all, 10=Liked a lot", answers found in the column 'SchoolApprovalRating' in '2020ssc_public.xlsx'.
There may be a third group consisting of people with a low view of the conventional model of schooling, public and private, people who were bored in school, got their education mostly elsewhere, don't want their kids' schooling to get in the way of their education. That would describe us. I have taught at the college and graduate level and published in two fields in neither of which I ever took a course for credit.
This describes us as well. I don't know whether we make up 5 or 10% of all homeschoolers but my impression is it's small.
I've known a lot of homeschoolers, and don't know that I ever met one who fit into this category. Closest was a family that was religious but also worked in higher education (father was a college professor and I think the mom also worked as an academic), so could be categorized either way.
Is this to say that you don't know homeschoolers who were secular and well educated and motivated to do homeschooling because school was seen to be not a great option for their smart kids?
I mean, I guess that makes sense just in the sense that something like 90% of homeschoolers are religious. Some portion of the 10% secular ones are perhaps more hippies than professional class. And some portion of the 10% are regular folks of whatever kind of background who are homeschooling because their kids have special needs and the school sucked at helping them.
Hmm, I think a lot hinges on what you mean by "not a great option for their smart kids." I knew secular homeschoolers who had very smart kids. They seemed to more closely align with the "wild forest children" that organoid called them above - but that's a judgement call. I don't know that I ever sat down with them and talked about the philosophical underpinnings of their choice, and whether it may have been more "free range libertarian hippie" or more "Modern pedagogy is flawed, we will have better results training them at home." The one family I probably knew the best, in retrospect, was likely heavily both.
I would agree with your assessment that the remaining 10% is likely split, and likely has a lot of overlap.
Some further results. Continuing to refine the analysis, I restricted the sample to respondents in the U.S. and Canada, and tweaked the religious backgrounds into "religious" and "secular"—in the idiosyncratic sense of "I'd guess that if a U.S. or Canadian family with this religious background chose to homeschool, it would be for [X] reasons", such that "secular" includes Jewish, Buddhist, and Unitarian. There were a total of 3179 school alums from "religious" backgrounds, 1207 from "secular", 209 probably-religious homeschoolers, and 28 probably-secular ones. I plotted mean and 95% CI for numeric responses, and squinted to see which groups are confidently different, with no Bonferroni correction or anything. Wish I could upload graphs!
Distinguishing characteristics: In a reassuring sanity check, religious homeschoolers who read SSC came from much larger families, with a mean ParentingKnowledgeNumber of 4.2 (CI 3.6–4.9) vs around 2.5 for all other groups. Similarly, secular homeschoolers were more likely to have professor parents (mean 0.45 parents, CI 0.2–0.7) than people from religious backgrounds (religious homeschoolers 0.12, secular schooled 0.25, religious schooled 0.16). Political spectrum placement (after growing up and deciding to read ACX, of course) varied in the expected direction but only slightly (religious schooled 4.8, secular schooled 4.2, religious homeschooled 5–5.6, secular homeschooled 3.8–5.1), which is why I backed off from my "hippie" vs "trad" framing.
Success metrics: only religious homeschoolers approved of their schooling confidently more than school alumni (CI 6.6–7.3, vs means around 5.9 for both backgrounds); secular homeschoolers had the same mean but a wide CI from 5.9–7.9. Secular homeschoolers had marginally significantly lower romantic satisfaction (CI 4.2–6.1 vs a mean of ~6.2 and CI <1 for the other groups; for Life, Job, and Social satisfaction, secular homeschoolers had a worse mean than the other groups (which were similar to each other) but with CI fully overlapping. SAT scores were all weirdly high, of course; for verbal scores there was a clear difference (CIs about 735-765 for religious schooled, 745–755 for secular schooled, 745–765 for religious homeschooled, 765–785 for secular homeschooled), but keep in mind that probably only the most academically-minded homeschoolers sat for the test. Scoring "no degree" as 0, high school as 1, <4-year degrees as 1.5, bachelor's as 2, master's as 3, and terminal degrees as 4, school alumni got more degrees (2.4±.1) than homeschoolers (2.0, with religious CI from 1.9 to 2.2 and secular from 1.6 to 2.4).
Other features: The secular homeschoolers were definitely queerer than the others: they averaged a whopping 2.2–3.1 out of 5 on the Likert "would you switch sexes if you could", while all other CIs were between 1.7 and 1.9, and 10–40% were non-cis, compared to 7–13% of religious homeschoolers, 5–8% of secular schoolers, and 4–6% of religious schoolers. Only 64% of the secular homeschoolers were heterosexual, vs. 77–82% of other groups. I was curious about immunology (allergies and acne), organization (tabs and unread emails), and character (imagination, mood, anxiety, and trust in others). None of these clearly distinguished "religious" from "secular" homeschoolers and only one distinguished homeschoolers from schoolers (homeschoolers are more trusting), but secular school alumni clearly had less trust, imagination, and acne than school-goers from their "religious" (basically Christian but not Unitarian, Quaker, or having parents from different traditions) classmates.
Overall I was able to discern the outlines of the "trad" and "hippie" family structures I remembered, but this reanalysis doesn't unlock much additional information except that people raised in secular households away from the middle-school gender conformity police are much more likely to express minority gender and sexual identities in adulthood. This may be because I'm wrong that these two styles cut the homeschooling community at its joints, but could also be because many secular homeschoolers reported a ReligiousBackground that I used to classify them as "religious", or because filtering homeschooling alums by SSC readership erased the cultural differences between these groups, or simply because n=28 wasn't enough to confidently analyze secular homeschoolers. Obviously comparing to a differently-selected sample would be interesting, but adding "was religion a major component of your upbringing?" to future ACX surveys would be very helpful as well!
Thanks for doing all this work!
I was raised homeschooled and have known a *lot* of homeschoolers. My personal take was 80/20 religious/secular and am pleased to see that pan out here as well, even if it's closer to 90/10.
I think there may be another category out there that we're both missing, which may help explain that higher incidence of gender non-conformance. Someone in a different thread mentioned people who went to homeschooling due to issues in school. Some would certainly be trouble-makers who were suspended or expelled, or struggled academically. Another group may be those who didn't if in socially, including those that are non-conforming. Any thoughts on how to separate any of this out? My guess would be that the survey numbers are too small to have confidence in the answers, unfortunately.
Yeah, I agree that those subclusters ought to exist, and there's enough detail across questions to start putting together anecdotes—e.g. you could look at secular vs. religious homeschoolers who are not cishet, and look at how many of each report SAT scores as a proxy for how academically oriented they were. But between the small Ns (e.g. 7 non-cis secular homeschoolers) and the layers of imperfect proxies we'd be relying on, I doubt the results would be very enlightening.
Two more notes. First, non-institutional-schoolers from religious backgrounds mostly (92%) identified as "homeschoolers" rather than "unschoolers" , but so did those from "secular" religious backgrounds (75%), confirming that the grouping of homeschoolers by family religious background is not well-captured by the home/un distinction.
Second, I was wondering if the lower RomanticSatisfaction of secular homeschoolers might be driven by the higher proportion of queer folks among this group having trouble finding partners with appropriate orientation or who accept their identities. It is not: cishet secular homeschoolers have a mean RS of 5.1, vs. 5.3 for non-cishet secular homechoolers, and 6.1–6.7 for the corresponding subgroups of religious and institutionally schooled respondents.
> Wow! Home schooling is even more religious than religious schools!
Well, yes, that's what home schooling is. It's not bespoke tutoring for future Isaac Newtons. It's a way for religious people to keep their kids out of the clutches of the godless state. The energy behind legislation for making it easier to home school your kids comes from religious people.
I have some familiarity with this area because I took my kid out of the public school system during the pandemic, which meant that technically I was a home schooler (we hired a teacher with some other families). The two things you immediately discover when you do this is that 1) it is shockingly easy to take your kid out of public school and 2) you need to look around to find the other secular folks.
For #1, you barely have to do anything at all. Did you imagine that there would be elaborate forms to process, maybe some kind of proof or at least attestation that you are providing a semblance of education to your kid? Perhaps a chat with a state social worker? Nope. Just let the school know, "Hey, we're not sending our kid next year."
Regarding #2, there are tons of home school class materials and curricula available, but a lot of them are things like, "Math, but with Jesus" and "Spare the rod, invite trans Satan into your home."
In case it sounds like I'm anti-home schooling: I'm not. I'm sure there are some parents who do a terrible job home schooling their kids -- it would be shocking if that weren't that case -- but in the main I suspect it works out fine for most families, and of course people are free to instill religious values and beliefs in their children, for better or for worse. But this is very much what home schooling is.
"For #1, you barely have to do anything at all. ... Just let the school know, 'Hey, we're not sending our kid next year.'"
The details are state specific. In California you don't notify your local public school. Other states are more restrictive and some require regular testing of the homeschooled kids (California does not).
But, in general, yes, homeschooling tends to have very little state supervision.
In SOME states. For example in Hawaii it is very difficult to (legally) homeschool your child.
I just read Hawaii's homeschool law and it's much the same as everywhere else. If you don't want to have to standardize test your child, you pay a certified teacher (like $35) to write a one-sentence letter saying your child has made sufficient progress this year. We did this in two states where we lived all the years we homeschooled and it couldn't be easier.
That's not exactly everywhere else (like Texas, which has no reporting requirement and you can write a high school diploma).
And it's four standardized tests at specific grades plus an annual progress report plus the school has wiggle room to push for a bit more (such as declared curriculums). In practice from what I've seen (my mother is currently a teacher in Hawaii) is the schools pressure the parents to leave the child enrolled and just not attend (presumably for financial reasons). I've also known a few unschoolers who had to flee the state because the local principal started cranking up requirements and enforcement. (It isn't clear whether that was because they refused to enroll or just the principal's objection to their lifestyle.)
The culture of that does sound different, though if those stories are from years ago, there were a lot of stories like that years ago. If those are current stories, then yikes.
Maybe I misread the website when I looked -- it seemed to me the testing was one option and the annual assessment by a certified teacher another option and that the tests were therefore avoidable. In states that have a testing option versus a teacher assessment option, the testing is often required every year.
I know there are states laxer than that and there are a few more strict (Maryland last i checked), but it looked like what I was familiar with from the more in-between states. I may be totally wrong about that.
This mostly jives with my experience (homeschool, religious upbringing). Your readership might skew in the direction of liking homeschooling more, though - I liked it mostly because it gave free rein to my curiosity. Some of my friends and siblings who were less intellectually self-driven had a lot harder time with it.
Socially, I'm highly extroverted but didn’t learn that until later in life. I would say that I had a stunted social experience growing up that in turn made me the typical homeschool type: awkward and anxious, etc. I know other kids who were similar. But it took about two years of college to get over 90% of that. In my observation, homeschoolers start off weird, but they figure it out. By my late 20s, I rarely thought about anything that happened in high school and could barely tell the difference between friends who were homeschooled or public schooled.
Looking across my friends and acquaintances, I'm persuaded by the Harvard study idea that loving and supportive parents are much more influential than structural differences in upbringing. I have watched people with cruel, controlling, or highly ideological parents go in much different directions than those whose parents were present, reasonable, and loving - whatever their schooling background. Some of the worst homeschooling outcomes I know aren't really from the homeschooling itself - they are kids whose parents homeschooled them because of their own controlling and narcissistic instincts. One friend in particular is a huge queer anti-homeschooling activist now. Her argument is basically: "if I was in school there would have been other adults who could catch what was going on."
If you're an educated person thinking about homeschooling your kids, I would start with your own motivations, not a theory of education. Why do you really want to do this? If the answer is something along the lines of "I think this would be good for my child," then your kid will probably be fine as long as you make an effort. If it's something like "I want to have full power to craft a culture war weapon that I can then unleash upon the world to validate my ideas," then I guarantee your kid will be all kinds of messed up (and will probably hate you). I'm less familiar with secular private schools, but I imagine the same dynamic exists. If you're sending them to Braxley-Sheaton-Hogwarts because you want them to have the best experience possible, then they'll probably be fine (but they would probably be fine in a government school too). If you're sending them there to try to ensure they carry on the family legacy and make you proud, then they probably won't.
Well said all this.
I'm just here to say that school is still nothing more than Child Prison to me.
Unschooling is necessarily going to be hard to characterize because it's more about something that is NOT happening (schooling).
In future analyses, can you put confidence intervals around your means (or give some other measure of spread like standard error)? It’s really easy to do, and it’s hard to eyeball-interpret the differences between means without them.
If you don’t know how to do this: the standard error (I.e. standard deviation of the mean estimate) is the standard deviation / sqrt(sample size), and the simplest way to compute a 95% confidence interval is to multiply the standard error by 1.96 and add/subtract that from the mean.
Adding to this to optimize for Scott's time: It's enough if you additionally report the standard deviation of each numerical value and we can do the rest. If you use Google Sheet, you can simply use =STDEV() function (in between the parentheses write the whole area of the column whose stdev you are interested in) which will correctly use the unbiased estimator. (eg: =STDEV(F2:F) if you want to calculate the standard deviation of the data in the F column and your data lines start from the second row)
I got the following for average life satisfaction with 95% confidence intervals based on the public dataset:
6,566276616 +- 0,05687015343
6,729257642 +- 0,2972905432
6,665865385 +- 0,1399126664
6,665173572 +- 0,1366675226
6,032258065 +- 0,9290823762
with these counts:
5213
229
832
893
31
Maybe, but note that it's the confidence interval for the mean and the mean of the distribution could be a non-integer number.
I'm a little surprised at the surprise of how religious home-schoolers are. I consider myself religious, attending a church in my community regularly. But there is a group that is far more religious than my congregation on average, and that is the subset of the community that embraces home schooling. I think they are mostly trying to avoid the 'evil influences' of public education or something to that effect. And I think this is at least common across the whole region where I live. Rather than surprise, I would hypothesize that home-schoolers across the nation are even more religious than the home-schooled ACT readers, and yes, more religious than the average religious school attendees. Keep in mind that many religious schools are Catholic. I'm not trying to disparage the Catholic faith, but it strikes me as one of the least religious religions.
Depending on region, it's estimated 50-90% of homeschoolers are doing it for religious reasons. In the two places we did it, I'd say it was 90% (not us). Of all the religious homeschoolers I spoke with, it was absolutely to shield their child from what they felt was the bad secular influence of public schooling. Though all homeschooling families to some extent are trying to shield their children from what they consider to be various kinds of bad influence of schools, public or otherwise.
"I'm a little surprised at the surprise of how religious home-schoolers are."
Yeah, I had the same thought. This was not surprising to me in the least.
I'm not *surprised*, really, but that's because I think there is a bimodal distribution of home-school families, at one peak the intellectual bohemians who feel school is too boring and constrained for their children, and at the other religious conservatives who feel school is too wicked and sinful for their children. The population here is much more closely aligned with one of those than the other.
But, yeah, there's always been a big religious component to homeschooling.
Devil's advocate position on my own subgroup: I wonder if homeschoolers (not specifically those in your sample, but all of us) might not be slightly conditioned to answer higher on "are you happy, was homeschooling good" type surveys. There's a thing where a lot of people will ask you those questions in an adversarial way - i.e. "Isn't it hard to be homeschooled, considering you are a friendless loser freak?" or "What do you think about homeschooling your kids, considering it will ruin them forever and ever?"
When that happens, I think one of the normal human reactions to that is to be like "No, it's great, in pretty much every way", because if you say admit to any flaws at all in any tone at all, sometimes the reaction you get is "See, I knew it was a horrible practice in every way and that I can now smugly look down on you for it".
I've been trying to figure out a way this kind of effect could even be quantified, if it exists. Were gay marriages more likely to report happiness shortly after national legalization because they knew it was a politically relevant question? What about transitioners? What about the religious in general?
I feel a little of this. If you don't think it's terrible, you feel a certain need to defend it because people come in with so many assumptions about you.
I like that observation. In the gay example, one possibility is to survey over several years and see if there’s significant change. Then hope, that the change can be explained because of initial novelty ... yeah, right, I guess it’s nigh impossible?
Yes. That is probably a thing.
But also: it's getting better-- with a significant improvement since COVID, maybe due to the huge jump in the number of homeschoolers that resulted, but also thanks to the huge number of parents who had to do distance-learning at home with their kids, and were happy to send them back to school...
There was a definite adversarial tone toward homeschoolers when I was a kid (I went mostly to religious schools, but did homeschool a couple of years) and all through young adulthood, but now that I am homeschooling my own... perhaps it's a regional thing, but attitudes are VERY different now. I take my kids out on errands with me during school hours and it is common for some random woman (always a woman) in a shop to ask if my kids are homeschooled, and then go on to say something like "I thought they might be-- they're so well-behaved/articulate and they are asking so many questions!" followed by "they remind me of my homeschooled nieces/nephews/grandkids--you're doing a great job!" or occasionally "We homeschooled ours! The last one just graduated!" (secret homeschooler handshake) We had a couple over recently to repair the kitchen, and after day two of coming in when the kids were doing math at the dining table, the wife was like "they're homeschooled?" yeah. "Oh, that's wonderful-- we had to do that during lockdowns and it was *really hard*"-- all friendly, no judgement.
I think there are just a LOT more people now who know at least one homeschooling family or have attempted homeschooling themselves, so they've gotten over the foreign-ness of it, and there's less knee-jerk judginess about it. I can't remember the last time I encountered the "well of course your children will be socially stunted" thing from anyone but my mother-in-law ;)
Progress!
Thanks for this, Scott! Quick question about the original survey - was there any way to control for responders who fit in multiple schooling categories (e.g., public school for awhile, then homeschooled)?
In my experience (which may not be generalizable), lots of homeschooling families start off sending their kids to public, get disillusioned, then try homeschooling, realize it's too hard as the kid hits the upper grades, and then fork over the money for private or religious school. This lines up with my own background as well: public school until I had a major medical condition, homeschooling during the medical condition and for a couple years after, then religious school for grades 9-12. How would a person like me get diced up in the survey? :)
I was unschooled at the same time as going to state school ;-)
Hahaha. Some people would call that "anti-schooling"!
But honestly, you can spell. And your grammar and sense of humor are fine. So was it all completely for naught? =D
> Wow! Home schooling is even more religious than religious schools!
I wonder how this correlates with age, but it doesn't surprise me. Most Catholic schools, in my experience, do an awful lot to undermine the faith -- teaching it badly, hiring teachers or ultra-heterodox nuns that vocally dissent from the faith on nearly every core belief (the real presence, abortion, contraception, the incarnation, the immaculate conception, Jesus being male, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, etc.). I go to a traditionalist parish, and a lot of families here homeschool because the religious instruction and formation is either lacking or wrong in most of the local Catholic schools.
I went to a private protestant school. I think there's also an issue with families who send their kids to religious school, but who either aren't religious themselves, or who belong to a denomination with significantly different beliefs from those endorsed by the school (in which case the religious education can actually set up internal conflict and cynicism later). Kids who don't come from a religious home are unlikely to become religious as a result of going to a church-run school.
There are no local private schools in our denomination, our church generally is very liturgically conservative and attracts traditionalists, so... our parish also has a *lot* of homeschoolers. Part of that is that the homeschool families just have more kids per family on average. IMO, it's not strictly that the really dedicated religious people homeschool because the religious schools aren't good enough. Maybe some of them would be willing to send their kids to a private school, but with more than three school-age children, the tuition costs would be staggering.
We homeschool ours for a lot of reasons, but very large among them is that we can't afford to live in a good school district OR send them to private schools. So home ed. is the best education we can give them. It *looks* like that may be reflected a bit in the survey numbers also. Wealthier people are less likely to homeschool, and way more likely to do private school, even though they are also more religious on average.
Tuition costs are a bit of a problem as well with larger families. Because of complicated reasons, I unfortunately have only have two children, but the average in my parish seems to be around 6. Almost no one at my parish send kids to public school, some send to private Catholic schools, and the majority homeschool. The local Catholic schools range from terrible to pretty good with respect to orthodoxy, religious formation and catechesis. None are stellar. My personal preference is homeschooling with attendance to community functions, so the children get opportunities to socialize. At the end of the day, no one is going to care about your kids as much as you do, and you're going to do a good job if you put in the effort, and also emphasize what is most important to you. To me, the worldly education is important, but less so than the religious education and formation.
I agree that sending kids from a secular family to even the best religious school will rarely result in the children adopting the faith; if they aren't seeing a continuity with what's happening at home, it's unlikely to stick (I'm the rare counterexample; my parents were irreligious, but sent me to Catholic school as a child because the local public school was under-performing, and I'm Catholic today in part because of it). Similarly, the kids at most parishes that are sent to their first communion and confirmation classes, whilst the parents don't practice the faith, are unlikely to stay with it after they receive their sacraments.
I don't worry about my kids' social development-- in addition to the zillion other kids they see at church (and we stay late after services just so they can run around the churchyard together), they belong to 4H, and we live in a neighborhood with tons of kids where nobody can afford to overschedule them. They have plenty of friends, and no shortage of opportunities to socialize.
We don't do much to teach religion in any formal sense. We just *are* religious, and since the kids are with us they're part of that. Give it 20 years and I can tell you if that approach worked to inculcate religion ;)
You know your kids best, as well as your current situation.
We have to make a bit more effort to socialize our kids. My parish, though close for me, is quite a bit of a drive for most of the congregation, so people tend not to live too close. Traditional Catholic parishes are few and far between (there's like 5 in my state), so the majority of people have a bit of a drive to get there, thus there sadly isn't a lot of functions during the week and such. Socializing with the kids at church on Sunday only just isn't enough, so we have to make an extra effort. One of my children is also quite shy, nerdy, and introverted, like me, and needs some extra effort to get engaged with people. And the area we live in just doesn't have a lot of kids, sadly. It's also become quite an expensive area since I purchased it, so young families with lots of kids can't really afford to live here. I'm actually hoping to move some time this year to an area where I know a lot of families with good kids of similar ages.
I wish you luck in raising your family well.
Likewise! I hope you find a good neighborhood!
I'm applying for the position of village idiot at ACX. I don't recall exactly but my verbal SAT was something like 600. Be kind to the village idiot.
To publish this results without publishing standard deviations, should be embarrassing to someone who is attempting to be serious and claiming a "rationalist" moniker.
How would you derive standard deviations from multiple choice answers of a closed set?
sqr of p*(p-1)/n
huh, what is p and n?
If I had X responses in one category out of Y total answers. I'd like to see the ratio as
X/Y +/- sqrt(X)/Y
is that the same (or similar) thing?
LOL, I think my above comment qualifies as my most embarrassing in the last 10 years. I’ll chalk it up due to caffeine and sugar induced stupor.
Yup.
You were surprised that home schoolers are even more religious than people attending private religious school?
Maybe it's because my son is in catholic school and maybe it's because I know several people who home school their kids - but i knew this from experience.
People who don't like the libs and are vaguely religious send their kids to religious private school.
People who are super duper committed to their religion home school their kids.
Also a reasonable fraction of “religious” schools attempt to be mostly secular. I know a number of (mostly secularly raised) Jews who’s parents sent them to the local catholic school because it was perceived as the highest quality place in the area. They has a requirement for basically a religion/philosophy hybrid type class, but that was pretty much it as far as religious instruction- and it was generally well liked as an easy grade, with plenty of debate for those that liked that. I’ve anecdotally heard of similar places around the county though I don’t know what fraction of these make up private religious schools.
My son is in catholic school and has a short religion lesson daily, a prayer to start and end each day, and attends mass every Thursday morning. So at least his is very intentionally not secular.
Unschool responder here! One confounding factor is my very religious parents would have said homeschooling. I started in 6th grade because the public school was ‘too worldly’ and my small town didn’t really have other options. My mom had enthusiasm for the task at the start but that very quickly dissolved into an obsession with tennis and other personal interests. I was vaguely encouraged to read, but it was really my choice- assuming I stuck to Christian books. There was no curriculum. There were no taught lessons. She did buy me math textbooks. I devoured them and even gave myself math tests which I graded myself. I think this all says a lot more about me than it does the quality of the education. For science I was once supplied with an anti evolution trac. I don’t think it is fair to homeschoolers to call what i experienced homeschooling, but this isn’t a regulated industry. Quality varies widely and there may be less of a distinction than you are thinking. And, as for satisfaction with their education, the less satisfied homeschoolers are perhaps, like me, inclined to label it unschooling.
What is your opinion about the results of this un/home schooling for you? Was it a problem later to get a job?
I don’t have much opinion in the results. SA says the sample size is small and I’m pointing out that there may be more grey area between that and homeschooling than assumed. One way would be to define, for the survey, unschooling as an intentional parenting philosophy vs as a lack of curriculum.
Aa for my own life, that’s complicated. I’ve recovered so I don’t feel it is impactful now. But that took work so I would say that it WAS impactful. At a practical level, I had no high school diploma or transcripts. I got a GED and went to community college so I could transfer into a four year college. But, on the plus side, once I was able to go, my early experience made school new and exciting which was probably helpful and i approached education as something I was supposed to figure out and explore vs expecting to be lectured about so I could memorize it — and that has definitely been helpful. Socially, I think the larger negative impacts were from the extreme religiosity vs the schooling approach, but those are a little hard to separate and I would also argument that those impacts are largely in the past either way. I have good friends and am happily married for example. College was a very socially awkward time though.
I remember reading some reddit discussions like "homeschoolers, what was best/worst about your experience", and in the negative list, many homeschoolers reported something similar -- parents starting enthusiastic about the whole project, then burning out but refusing to admit failure, so the original vision of high-quality homeschooling reduced to unschooling, or just learning one subject (the parent's favorite) and ignoring everything else.
> I don’t think it is fair to homeschoolers to call what i experienced homeschooling
If bad schools count as "schools", I think it is perfectly fair to count bad homeschooling as "homeschooling". It would be better to make a histogram to show both the best and the worst examples of homeschooling, but then of course we should do the same for schools.
This makes me (very very slightly due to not thinking these results say much of anything at all) feel better about sending my daughter to public school. Aside from things that could easily be the result of confounders, there's not enough difference here to make me think schooling type has huge implications on life outcomes, at least for folks who read this blog.
As far as I’ve read in the literature, the parental attributes (SES, highest education) trump all factors at the child level. Almost all the variance comes is fully explained by parents with everything else being Gaussian noise at the population level. If you select for more specific factors such as special needs this changes.
My impression is that many parents who decide to homeschool do so because their child is an outlier in some way and because the child was not happy in school. So I think it's hard from this data to conclude that the kind of schooling wouldn't make a big difference for your kid. Our kid did school and was homeschooled both (in an unschooling way) and his happiness difference between the two was really dramatic and entirely justified why we decided to homeschool. He did school at the beginning for a couple of years and he did a couple of years of high school, he did very well academically but hated it every time.
I guess what I'm saying in shorter version is that each individual kid's happiness and satisfaction can't be revealed by looking at these averages because within each category of schooling is a bell curve distribution of satisfaction from low to high. You move a child from one category of schooling to another and that child may move very far on the satisfaction bell curve without any of the averages changing.
This was really interesting - thankyou! As the parent of an 18 year old boy and 15 old girl, I have asked myself many of these questions - especially since the covid lock-downs. Your findings make me feel like maybe I HAVEN'T made any huge mistakes in their educations thus far.
I had some fun playing with the data; a couple general points:
- agree that you generally want to work with interaction variables of childhood SES x school type
- I would be skeptical of applying many results from the overall survey data to girls and to average/below average test scorers because the sample is so skewed
Result #1: American men age 30 or older whose childhood was "middle class" were less likely to currently describe themselves as "rich" or "upper middle class" if they were homeschooled than if they went to public school (p=0.013). Noting that the coefficient for private school was positive but insignificant (p=0.140).
Result #2: American men who had indicated their education was complete were more likely to have an advanced degree (mostly thinking of this as another way of asking "how much did you like/excel at school?" and the high SAT score of the sample and similar average across modes of education might actually be a plus here) if their childhood was one of the richer-than-middle-class categories, and less likely if their childhood was one of the poorer-than-middle-class categories. The only school type or interaction variable that was significant was children from a poorer-than-middle-class background x homeschooled being particularly less likely to have an advanced degree (p=.021). Meanwhile, while "private x poorer" and "religious x poorer" weren't statistically significant, their coefficients were positive and of greater magnitude than the negative coefficient for the poorer-than-middle-class variable alone. Given how underpowered these groups are, it supports a theory that smart kids from poor backgrounds like school better in those two environments than in public school.
Might try to think of more things to look at later.
Very interesting thank you! What kind of models are you runing exactly?
So the comment above is based on linear regression. I probably shouldn't have added that last bit about people from poorer backgrounds in particular without checking a logistic model. I have done that now, and the statement about the relative coefficients holds, and the other results I talked about also have good sized coefficients in the corresponding direction.
For example, result #1 comes from creating a dummy variable for ClassCurrent = ["Upper middle class" or "rich"] and regressing it on dummies for private school, religious school, and homeschool (I dropped the unschooled and blank responses).
Thank you for the precisions!
I'm an American male from a poorer-than-middle-class background, homeschooled, and have no degree at all. Which doesn't prove anything, but it's fun to corroborate something so specific! (I didn't take Scott's survey.)
Forgive me if I've missed mention of it -- how many total homeschoolers are there in the sample of 8,000?
Ugh sorry, right at the top of his post. The sample size of homeschoolers is tiny tiny.
Speaking for myself, my son is autistic and has ADHD; we made the large financial sacrifice to send him to private school, because he was falling apart academically and socially in middle school. You definitely need to include learning differences and social dysfunction in the questionnaire.
Did it help him?
This too. I and two of my siblings ended up going to private religious school because my older sibling was relentlessly bullied in public school, and my parents were unable to get help from the school admin. A lot of people homeschool for similar reasons. It's frankly pretty amazing that this isn't showing up more in the stats for private and home schools (the probably higher-than-average rate of kids with learning disabilities and social/behavioral problems, who are not in public school *because* of those problems).
Calling out once again that your survey didn’t ask people where they grew up or did most of their schooling, it asked which country they most “identify with”. (Whatever that means.)
There’s likely some fraction of people who answered “United States” for the “country” question, but are immigrants who grew up somewhere else. The design of your survey makes it impossible to tell how big that group of people are and might lead to inaccuracies in generalizing about the US (or any particular country).
If you say the non-US numbers aren’t too different here, then maybe it didn’t affect this specific analysis too much, but I’d be on guard for this general class of errors.
True. There are some countries (such as Peru) where *all* schools are essentially private schools. I wonder how much of a difference this makes wrt "private school" stats.
On homeschooling and religiosity: one obvious factor:
If you are religious family, homeschooling allows you the scheduling flexibility to attend more than one church service per week-- this is a bigger thing for the more "high church" denominations that are likely to have morning services on weekdays, when most kids are in school. IIRC there is a strong correlation between number of services attended per week as a kid, and religiosity as an adult. Our own church surveys indicate that kids who only attended Sunday services (i.e. once a week) have a lousy retention rate as adults-- once a week isn't enough.
One of the supposed benefits of unschooling is that it can help people develop greater creativity. It would be interesting to look for this in the data. Is there anything in the data that could serve as a proxy for creativity?
Biggest obvious confounded not mentioned: having parent(s) who want their child in private/homeschool/unschooling
That’s going to correlate with a ton of upstream features of the parents (probably reducing to genes and small environmental factors)
Or in local terms: my priors on any of these outcomes being impacted by schooling type vs genes are unmoved and still in the 99% genetic factors camp.
I would be interested to see results on single-sex vs coed schools, although I know that single-sex schools are very rare in the US.
Maybe this is a little off topic, but it surprises me how few second generation homeschoolers there are.
I would expect to see it a lot, but I am the only homeschooling parent who was homeschooled in the homeschool social groups my kids are a part of.
Is this just because homeschooling was rarer (or done for different reasons, like being too poor/rural to make it to a public school) a generation ago?
...I guess I have a dataset I could use to answer this question, maybe I'll do this later.
On one hand, yes it was rarer a generation ago, but I would expect a very high intergenerational aspect. If only 0.5% were homeschooled a generation ago, I would think of those people who have kids, 80%+ would in turn homeschool their kids. So in a group that's already selected for being homeschoolers (a homeschool social group) and an environment where 3% homeschool now I'd expect at least a sixth of the kids to be second generation.
Unless there were effects such as:
* 2nd generation homeschoolers don't tap into the same social network and I missed the signal. (Possibly due to the homeschool scene growing enough to fragment.)
* People who grow up homeschooled move to a different state (although Texas is strong economically and has good homeschool laws).
* 2nd generation homeschoolers have a higher chance of not reproducing.
* The Austin metro's cost of living is too high for homeschoolers who know in advance what they are getting into.
Another thought: religious homeschoolers might be less likely to religiously homeschool their children as opposed to secular homeschoolers, and a generation ago religious homeschoolers were a large fraction of the population?
My impression is that homeschooling only opened up as an option in the U.S. in the 1960s. My generation (Gen X) is the first one that could really have been homeschooled but it was vanishingly rare. I wasn't homeschooled but my kid was (he's Gen Z). I just don't think we've had enough time.
Gen Z, sure, but what about Gen Y? We're in our late-20s to early 40s and should be having kids now. In 1999 about 1.7% of school-aged children were homeschooled (https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/homeschool/chara.asp). 1.7% of 9-12th graders as well.
Yeah I see your point. I don't know how much this is a factor... most homeschooling laws in US states anyway don't apply until a child is 7. I don't know how many Gen Y people have kids who are over 7 years old?
Don't know if it generalizes, but among the survey respondents who were both homeschooled and had kids (count = 47), here are the number of respondents for each school satisfaction rating: 10 (=6), 9 (=10), 8 (=15), 7 (=4), 6 (=2), 5 (=4), 4 (=2), 3(=3), 2 (=0), 1 (=1).
Based on this alone, 80% + choosing to home-school seems high, though not much.
I’d guess having at least one stay-at-home parent is probably a factor. Only about 1-in-3 US parent households fall into this category. I don't know how likely it is for a homeschooled parent to stay home or to have a spouse that stays home, but I'd be surprised if it were greater than 4 out of 5.
Except having a stay-at-home spouse isn't something that happens randomly. If someone wants to pursue that lifestyle they will engineer it. Whether or not greater than 4 out of 5 can engineer it or not I have no idea, and it would be interesting to find out.
But thanks for pulling the numbers on the respondents. I do know one person who was homeschooled for some years growing up and did not think it was good who is strongly considering homeschooling her child, so I imagine it works the other way around as well.
I mentioned elsewhere that I found some data on the number of homeschoolers in 1999, and that they counted for 1.7% of school-aged children, and 9th-12th graders were also 1.7% homeschooled. Only about 80% were full-time homeschooled, but that's still a lot larger number than my off-the-cuff 0.5% mentioned above. And either way it still seems strange that out of 20-30 families in the social groups we interact with only a single parent has that background (and others often remark that they also don't know any 2nd generations).
Actually, I've been thinking that this is one of the stronger arguments against homeschooling: if those who were afforded it don't think it's important enough to pass it down, then that is evidence that it isn't that great.
Do you keep in touch with any of the other homeschoolers you knew as a child, or know if they have families and how they're educating their children?
I was homeschooled, and don't keep in touch or know what happened to most of the kids I grew up with. I follow one on social media; she had a terrible experience and went no-contact with her parents. One became a missionary, and homeschooled her children while away in a non-English speaking country. One sent a message about getting out of jail and changing genders a year or so ago. One is a single mother. One married twice, and has a child who recently started kindergarten. The rest have disappeared from my radar some time ago, so I don't know what became of them. I can't really generate a good picture here, but would be interested to hear from someone who could.
I don't have plans to homeschool my own children, though I'm open to it as a possibility at some point. My family is characterized by high openness and low agreeableness and conscientiousness. We drive one another crazy when we're cooped up together, and look forward to the day our three year old is ready to start preschool. She is very, very energetic and hyper, and needs more structure than I'm likely to give her. My mother visited a few weeks ago, and was trying to teach daughter to read. When we kids were grown, she went on to teach lower elementary at a public school. I think she just likes teaching -- and, especially, is suited to teaching lower elementary. I also teach, but not reading or arithmetic, and don't want to. It's possible the composition will change as former homeschoolers' children mature, but also that they have/will have different support structures in place, since it seemed like homeschool groups are most relevant in lower elementary. After 10 or so we pretty exclusively participated in (a homeschooler heavy) 4-H group and church youth group.
Several families at my church do intend to homeschool their children, or have started doing so, one of whom was homeschooled herself. This seems to be an aesthetic and ideological choice, without much investment in academic subject matter. They'll probably be better off if they can form a small religious school together, but nobody yet has the organizational skills or financing for that. I'm interested to see how it goes.
I lost all contact with my peers when I/they moved to college (not on social media). My parents (I believe) lost most contact when they moved to another state (not very sociable people). So I really have no clue when it comes to outcomes other than my own.
Regarding the high religiosity of home-schooled subscribers, this should not be surprise, because the home-schooling movement was strongly pushed by fundamentalist Christians.
The following story is worth approximately 0¢, statistically, but I find it amusing, so I'll tell it anyway. The son of a friend of mine was kicked out of HS for being a disruptive cut-up. He also committed pranks verging on the criminal toward a teacher he hated. He was taken to court and the settlement required the family to go to counseling for 6 months. My friend thought this was a draconian sentence, but afterwards, when I asked him how it went, he said that actually, it went well. One outcome was that his son, an artist who stayed up till 4am painting, should be home-schooled. His parents (who are ardent atheists, though they love to do a traditional Xmas, in which all the tree ornaments are hand-made by the family), let their son live on whatever schedule he liked, but they did give him assignments in the required state subjects. He applied to a very prestigious art academy and got 800s on his SATs. He was admitted and got to every class on time, whereas many of his fellow students stayed up all night and didn't necessarily go to class. I asked him about that and he said something like "Well, I already did that, but now I'm at a place I love, doing what I love."
I think your point about home schooling being associated with conservative Christian culture is correct and would explain greater religiosity if you polled the country, but it's harder to know if that explains what is going on in this survey because the numbers are incredibly skewed towards non-theism compared to the general population. The sample is so unrepresentative that it wouldn't be obvious that it's reflecting the reason for the general patterns you see in America or if there's some other niche explanation for this subpopulation extremely skewed towards nonbelief.
I agree with that, but since the sample population is skewed toward non-theism (as you said), my guess is that the religiosity of the home-schooled would be even larger in the general population. Of course, I used the word "guess" pointedly. ;-)
I noticed that some respondents put in their full SAT scores (e.g. 1550) instead of the subsection scores when answering the survey. How did you exclude these when taking the average scores for the verbal and math questions?
Seems weird that over a dozen people reported getting 1600 on their verbal section alone. Shouldn't they have good reading comprehension?
Maybe I've made a dumb error...can someone check?
The SAT scoring system changed as well. Everyone who took the SAT pre-2016 might be interpreting it totally differently
I could see how respondents who took it between 2005 and 2016 might have summed their Reading and Writing scores. But it looks like ten respondents said their math sub-score was 1600 too.
Yeah, not surprised that people skimmed too fast. Iirc I did the same before noticing my mistake.
Don't know what Scott did, but in Python I just converted them all to NaNs, along with non-numeric answers:
SATs=['SATscoremath','SATscoreverbalreading']
for section in SATs:
df[section]=pd.to_numeric(df[section],errors='coerce')
df.loc[df[section]>800, section] = np.nan
Thanks. Once excluding >800 and <100 (maybe some people put in their ACT scores?) I got numbers very close to Scott's. I'm guessing he did something similar and the differences are due to my using the publicly available dataset.
FWIW, 200 is the minimum
I am not sure the difference between home schooling vs. unschooling is robust - i.e. that people
who studied at home interpreted the question uniformly enough to answer one or the other according to the same criteria. In other words, two people who received the same home education may have given different answers to this one. How do you account for that?
It would be worth running some of these controlling for social class. For instance, none of the rich either home schooled or unschooled and none of the upper class unschooled, so if richer people are more satisfied with life or more likely to be married or ... that could make home schooled and unschooled look worse on those measures even if, controlling for social cost, they were better.
Possibly if you're rich enough and can afford private tutors/grinds, you don't call that homeschooling or unschooling, you call it tuition?
A quick eyeball of some of the numbers suggest that home schooling is the lower-class substitute for private schooling.
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Maybe the difference is I'm a paid subscriber and you aren't? Yes, that looks to be exactly it, I tried that on a substack that I am not a paid subscriber to and it does appear to have removed that one from my subscribe list, in spite of the fact that I didn't hit the big honking "unsubscribe" button.
Sounds like it's a poor Substack feature implementation.
A lot of people who enroll their kids in religious private schools aren't particularly religious, they just don't want their kids being beaten up.
I wonder what results you would get if you dis-aggregated public schools based on whether the school was a magnet school, or some other measure of school quality.
I was told by a psych PhD who studies giftedness that this school is easily the best school available for profoundly gifted kids: https://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/ They call themselves a public school, but they hardly seem like a typical public school (e.g. "Our accredited classes group students by ability rather than age", "Our unique approach to learning has attracted families from across the country and globe")
Hey @Scott, I was confused about one thing in the Survey. I'm retired, which I said early on. But then, much later, you asked things about "working" It wasn't clear to me whether I should answer that or not, and I I think I did answer.
Though retired, I do things that I consider "work", but not for remuneration. For example, one year, I was Treasurer for a non-profit org, and that was definitely work. But I also have some individual projects that I work on.
So I wish you had defined work more explicitly; For example, "activities associated with a job for which you are paid", if that's the definition you meant, whjch would have led me to pass up the question I referred to above.
It was unclear to me
Were the SAT averages calculated using corrections for the time period they were presumably taken, at least to address the major shifts? If so, what equivalence tables were used?
I tried to reproduce Scott's numbers and saw the following:
Reading
Public: 743 -> 741
Home: 756 -> 756
Religious: 751 -> 748
Private: 758 -> 758
Unschooling: 758 -> 758
Math
Public: 743 -> 739
Home: 722 -> 722
Religious: 727 -> 725
Private: 757 -> 754
Unschooling: 688 -> 688
I removed the data that listed scores higher than 800 or lower than 100. I made no correction for different tests.
About 13% of respondents listed ages 50 or higher, which is (I think) rounded to the nearest decade. The major renorming happened in 1995, so probably at least 1/8th of the scores should be corrected.
Those aged 50 and older had a mean of 709V, 723M. (SD 64V, 71M) with over 400 people reporting scores.
This seems like it adds up to weak argument for sending your kids to public school. All the effects are basically negligible, private school is expensive, and homeschooling is a ton of work.
My barely middle-class family scraped enough cash together to keep us in Catholic schools in the 1950s. We weren't particularly religious, but for some reason our folks decided parochial schools were better. The nuns were effective and exacting, and that ten years of education was one of the greatest gifts our parents gave us. (Serious religious women ran the schools; priests or brothers were rarely seen.) We didn't know what 'diversity', 'inclusion', or 'integration' was; classes were always a broad mix of 'races' or cultures with a smattering of Protestants, Jews, or nonreligious students.
Some non-denominational, evangelical schools seem to have adopted the more rigorous academic aspects of the old Catholic schools, but infused them with the more populist doctrines of American evangelical Christianity and appear to be doing quite well. But they are expensive, certainly unavailable to most households making less than six figures.
Yet, regardless of current arguments regarding rigor, regardless of attempts to inject white guilt and gender ideology into curricula, our town still has an Immaculate Conception School still run by nuns still proud to send most of its graduates to college.
Yes, one thing both my sister and I agree on is that being taught in a single-sex school by nuns didn't leave us with any feelings of "a woman's place is in the home" or "the husband is the head of the wife". We were expected to work hard in school, study, and that women could achieve as much as anyone. And this wasn't in the days of the new-style religious orders; while they did adapt to Vatican II reforms (e.g. in the habits), they still wore habits (they have abandoned them since, but that was years after I left school) and were orthodox in teaching the faith (although they did also adopt the new religion class textbooks of the 70s just when I was going into secondary school which dropped all the stuff about learning the dogma and instead went for the 'niceness is nice' and social justice angle, this is why I say I get all my theology out of Dante because the last actual catechism I learned out of was in 6th class when I was eleven).
I meant to write 'Immaculate Heart' School, but got waylaid by the pop culture meme of male pregnancy. But if pregnant men ever start their own school, I'll give them 'Immaculate Conception'.
Immaculate Conception is a perfectly Marian name for a school; we had both the Presentation and the Mercy convents in my town.
But it wouldn't work for pregnant men, unless you were saying the babies (and/or the fathers/mothers) were without Original Sin 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception
To me the obvious headline finding is theism.
Committed theists:
Public: 8.4%
Home: 28.8%
Religious: 20.1%
Private: 6.4%
Unschooling: 5.7%
This actually remarkable how much a difference schooling makes. Surely somewhere between 60 and 70% of public school people (far more than 8%) were raised with a household religious belief, yet for public school belief waned to 8.4%. Compare to home and religious school where one gets much better "retention" as it were. This seems very important for thinking about things like ideology in schools and whether it matters. In the religious context it does. Contra Caplan et al. I'd surprised if ideology in schools didn't matter.
The thing there is that this is not a survey of the general public, it's a survey of SSC/ACX readers. That will naturally tilt secular/agnostic/atheist even if all of us had been raised by Mowgli's wolf pack co-parenting with Tarzan's ape foster parents.
Degree of commitment to religious belief by parents also plays a part; if your family is 'culturally X' or 'vaguely Y' then it makes more of a difference between 'I drifted away from the last fraying tether of a religious identity' and 'my family practiced their faith and still don't quite understand why I gave it all up'.
The results indicate a strong positive for public schools because many of the factors associated with poor outcomes end up relegated to the public school group: working single mothers, messy divorces, financial insecurity, children raised by foster parents, parents who don't think much about education.
Meanwhile anyone who homeschools their kids is by definition putting enormous resources and effort into their children's education. The homeschool group will be composed of stable two parent households who are making huge sacrifices in order to do what they think is best for their children. Of course private school families are dumping a lot of money into education, so they have means and value their kids' learning.
The homeschool and unschool groups include a lot of parents who took their children out of school because their children were bullied or had mental health problems or otherwise weren’t coping with school.
That's true, but the public school group also includes all kids who were bullied or had learning needs and their parents did not have the means or motivation to pull them out of school and create a personalized learning environment.
Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles, would like to offer itself as a peer-reviewed publishing platform for any analyses using the ACX reader survey data. Visit the website (theseedsofscience.org to learn more or contact us at info@theseedsofscience.org.
This is great
Funny thing is the missing government-run/funded religious schools. Like the Catholic school system in Canada.
The unschooling results make sense to me; a decent proportion of the unschooling families I've known over the years appear to have opted for unschooling simply as a term to justify their severe educational neglect of their kids, often accompanied by other types of neglect as well.
Sorting that out from people who have ideological convictions about unschooling and do provide learning opportunities to their kids consistent w/the kids interests and needs would be complicatey.
My three children all unschool. It’s a second generation thing for them. I went to school till fifth-grade, homeschooled with a curriculum in sixth-grade, then unschooled after that.
Unschooling for me is definitely a way of life, and one that puts us far outside the societal norm. We’ve made seven moves since we’ve had kids, three times across state-lines, and not having to worry about “finding a good school” is a tremendous advantage to mobility. Even on a day-to-day basis, not having the rhythms of our family life determined by school schedules gives tremendous freedom to engage in the world. It’s very easy to go see a super-bloom, stay up late to look at the stars, take time when grandparents visit, or whatever else.
Our kids all take their education seriously. For what would be high-school, our oldest daughter volunteered in a university lab as a worker. She helped on several projects, ran equipment, performed bench work, and was even named as (an admittedly minor) co-author on a published paper. She’s now a sophomore at a UC school and began working in a lab her first term of college. Our two younger have been at least as aggressive in their own chosen domains.
While we definitely let the kids follow their own interests, we do insist on basic literacy and numeracy. While it hasn’t been a problem for us, were our kids not to be able to read or multiply and divide I’m sure we would have insisted they learn. But as I said, it just wasn’t an issue. My position on this is probably guided by my own family experience. My father has a B.S. in math and never uses it. My brother, who also unschooled, got into college not knowing much more than the most basic pre-algebra. But there, he fell in love with math, got a B.S. in math, and uses higher math on a daily basis.
While we mostly let our kids follow their interests, we do not desert them to figure things out themselves. And sometimes we do push them in certain directions. For instance my 11yo son wants to be an engineer and he’s making games in Unity. Earlier this month, and over his objections, I insisted he start using Co-pilot or Ghostwriter.
As i said in the beginning, our way of life puts us far outside the norm in ways that can be dangerous. For instance, about a decade ago, when we moved to a new state, we put the kids in school as an experiment. My wife had found a small horse-farm on the edge of town, and the kids were volunteering there a couple days a week to learn to care for the animals. We’d also take days to explore the new town, hike, visit museums etc., without too much regard to the school schedule. Within less than a month we got a call from the school asking about our kids unexcused absences. We explained the absences were perfectly fine, and that the public school was just one of several experiences we were affording our children, that we weren’t concerned with grades or any particular curriculum. The school told us if we had a handful more absences (I believe it was three) they’d need to call child protective services. We, of course, pulled the kids from school immediately to avoid the danger.
The point is, our natural way of living can very easily lead to severe consequences. For that reason, attending community college or college is important for the kids. Not so much for the actual content of the classes, but for the training in how to navigate and avoid conflict with the bureaucracies of our society.
People are frequently concerned about the social costs of homeschooling or unschooling. Certainly, it is more difficult as a non-schooler to meet kids your own age. And most of those kids, being schoolers, have their lives and realities dominated by a bureaucracy that is entirely alien to the non-schooler. On the other hand, the schooled environment is traumatic for many. And, as a non-schooler, i feel there is something abusive in sorting children into tightly-bound age cohorts, forcing them to sit still in rows of desks all day, at the mercy of an authority figure they’ve had no part in choosing, and to whom they must petition for even the right to use the bathroom.
But even if I were to accept for the sake of argument that the schooled environment is a healthy one for socialization, between sports, online communities, and homeschool groups, there are plenty of opportunities to socialize. The main social problem I see is finding romantic partners of the appropriate age. There’s really no good way to reliably meet your high-school aged crushes or boyfriend(s) as a non-schooler. So that mostly has to wait till college or the workplace.
That said I did have one girlfriend when high-school aged, don’t feel in retrospect I had more than the normal amount of awkwardness in my brief career of college dating, and ended up meeting my wife in my junior year. And, as a mid-forties man, I don’t feel the lack of socialization in public school kept me from developing personal friends or professional relationships.
A final thought on “unschoolers have low self-reported life-satisfaction.” Putting aside the small sample size and overall tightness of the reported values, I doubt the question compares apples-to-apples. Life satisfaction is essentially a measure of existential angst, and the unschooler’s existential angst is very different from the schooler’s. The unschooler is always forced to figure out for themselves what they want from life, whereas the schooler can allow themselves to be led by their peers, the system, or authorities. And so, especially at the younger ages answering the survey, it seems to me the schooled may be more likely to feel satisfied with their life because of external affirmations - graduating college, having a job, etc. Whereas the unschooler is more likely to judge their progress by their own standards. These seem like different enough yardsticks to me that we cannot reliably compare the readings between the two.
And a final finally, lest I’ve seemed to hate on public education or educators, I certainly recognize the tremendous social benefit the public school system offers in its breakfast and lunch programs. Many otherwise abandoned children obtain their only physical and emotional sustenance from the adults running their schools. Unschooling worked well for me and mine, but I really won’t confidently generalize its utility for children who are not natively curious, or lack parents who are devotedly solicitous of their care.
Many of these comparisons scream for a regression, instead of other adjustments. I feel bad saying this when I don't have time to run them myself and publish the results, but just noting it would make things more reliable and easier to communicate.
Also, should turn some of these tables (especially the 2d ones) into charts.