Heads up - your 'Learn Phrygian In Zero Days' link goes to this article on Neom that I'm guessing you were sharing with someone immediately before writing this post
On that note, a textbook/encyclopedia on Solar System would maybe be appreciated and even result in some learning. And I don't mean something made specifically for 2- or 3-year-olds.
I highly recommend finding some Music Together classes nearby. They are well done re: music education, the songs are much higher quality than whatever slop the algorithm is recommending, and you won’t be supporting Bezos
I second the Music Together recommendation! The songs are so catchy that we often sing them to our toddler, and they’ve come in handy during times like long car rides and diaper changes that otherwise could lead to screaming.
Our two year old got a "Yoto box" music player for Christmas. It's really captured his attention - he'll sit and listen to audiobooks, rapt. But now we can't go to bed without it. He needs his bedtime audio story (after his bedtime real book story). Last night, its battery died before he went to sleep, and he was furious. I swapped it out for his brother's while he wasn't looking and charged it, but forgot to put his back in place before he woke up. Big mistake! No 911 call, though.
Seconded on the Yoto! My 3 year old absolutely loves it, you have firm control over what music they have access to, and it's very robust. Strongly recommended.
Third on the Yoto. He mainly uses it for stories and car rides but he loves having control of it himself, and being able to switch cards to choose what he wants. And since I control which cards he has, it's a lot more parent-friendly than Alexa.
I've been building a playlist of stories for him from downloaded Cozyland and Ahway Island stories and he loves it.
My sample-size-of-one finding is that trains continue to be an emergency at least until age 8. My daughter is more civilized about them than she was as a toddler, but on a recent road trip she got extremely excited every time we passed a freight train. I was usually the one pointing them out to her, as I was watching the road while she read or drew or played games, but she would always enthusiastically drop whatever she was doing and look when I called her attention to a train.
Airplanes (especially ones with visible contrails) are also interesting, but not quite at the level of trains.
There's the Caltrain line that goes from Gilroy to SF, the BART lines in the East Bay and the Penninsula, the Amtrak line that goes through San Jose and the East Bay in its way to Sacramento and Northern California, and a bunch of freight trains that go on mostly the same tracks as the passenger trains. I think Scott in somewhere around Oakland or Berkeley, so BART, Amtrak, and several freight lines are likely to be salient.
Also, I seem to be suffering from a Mandela Effect thingy where I have very distinct memories of the Amtrak "Coast Starlight" train making a stop in Gilroy when I rode it in the early 2000s, but it definitely doesn't now and everything I can find online seems to indicate that the Coast Starlight always went straight from Salinas to Diridon Station in San Jose. Either my brain is mixing up Amtrak stop announcements with Caltrain (I definitely took Caltrain south to Diridon to get on Amtrak more than once, and at the time half the Caltrain runs continued on to Gilroy instead of ending in San Jose), or Amtrak is giving the Gilroy train station the Stalin treatment.
There's Caltrain, and then San Francisco itself has trolleys and cable cars. Places like the zoo have those little trains that tootle around the area. The West has trains!
"Ah, I see you've raised fellow train-enthusiastic urbanists. I didn't expect the Bay Area (that's where Scott lives, right?) to be amenable to this."
A friend of mine has a now-5-year-old boy.
Silicon Valley has CalTrain and light rail and for a while a common weekend activity was just riding them. Get ticket, get on, get off in 15 or 20 minutes, get on one going back to where we started then get off where we started.
There is also Amtrack, though not where we can see it on a normal day, and probably some freight traffic.
But once the kid realizes that the trains can be ridden much like an amusement park ride ...
Kai likes the BART. I feel kind of bad for him, because I grew up in the suburbs with great access to big freight trains, and I think Kai thinks the BART is all there is, and all those cool trains in his book are as mythical as dragons and unicorns. One day I want to take him to the big railroad in downtown Oakland, but I've been told that there's no way to predict freight train schedules ahead of time, and I don't want to sit there for hours with no guarantee of seeing anything.
There's plenty of freight traffic on the west coast, what with the ports there. The Union Pacific line runs through Oakland, though you may have a better time at Sacramento or Stockton.
Another option would be Virtual Railfan. They have webcams all around the world, several of which are available free on YouTube (their website offers more for paid subscribers). That was our go-to after moving to the west Phoenix valley, far from the major line in Flagstaff.
Growing up in Oceanside, I'd go out with my father every Thursday night to chase the Escondido Local, a very slow freight train. When they started the Sprinter light rail project, they upgraded the line for higher speed, which made it harder to keep up. We'd also take trips to Cajon Pass (a very busy four-track main runs through the valley, with a good spot right next to a hotel), but all this is probably way too far for you.
Does he have a route map? I lived in Oslo with a 3 year old train fanatic, where we got around mostly on street cars. He knew exactly which tram to take where with which connection to get home. I never knew how he figured this out, other than from studying the maps at the stops.
I have a picture of him on the TGV around that time, grinning madly.
Point Pinole would be a good trip. The parking lot is across the railroad tracks from the park, so you get great freight (and passenger) train access in a remarkably rural environment, plus all the nice things about the park and shoreline.
I wonder at what age he'd appreciate the rail museum in Sacramento? They've got some magnificent engines in there, but nothing is moving so maybe it wouldn't register. Then again many of them are steam trains, which is what children's books are depicting.
On the topic of Sacramento, they may be old enough to appreciate the Cali State Fair. I'm a Sac native, and have very fond memories of the Fair. Highly recommended.
When I was a kid I loved trains; my dad would take me on walks near the train tracks (there was a place about a mile away from our house where a road with a sidewalk ran parallel to the tracks for a while). We didn't always see a train there, but we did often enough that I was excited to keep going.
If you can make it down to the South Bay to Roaring Camp Railroads, it's a heritage steam railway that my kid really enjoyed riding; it goes up a very steep hill through a redwood forest and back down.
My kids just recently got old enough for me to take them on the VTA, pretty much the worst train system in the entire Bay Area.
They were so over the moon about it that we did not go to our destination, but rather stayed on the line all the way to the end and wrote it all the way back, all the while exclaiming, unprompted, “I'm so glad to be on the train!”.
My first week in the Bay Area, I was at the Caltrain station at 9pm and was glad there was a dad with two little boys standing nearby, talking about trains. The train came. I got on, glad that this trio was going to be with me instead of alone. But no! The dad said "alright, we saw the trains, now let's go home and sleep". They had driven all the way to the caltrain station just to see the train!
My toddler genuinely surprises me with her level of observation. She’ll point and shout at an airplane I’ve barely heard. Notice a toy tucked behind a chair, barely visible, all the way across the open concept living room.
Some combination of more acute sight and hearing and a less developed filter for shutting out extraneous sights and sounds?
I think it's just that they are constantly surrounded by things they don't understand, so they get very excited when they see something that they do. I don't know what all this other chaos is, but that right there is a horsey.
I think it’s the lowered filtering more than anything. Because I’ve seen similar behavior in people with developmental disabilities - like the time we did a family road trip through Colorado/Wyoming/Nebraska/South Daktoa and my disabled aunt lit up and pointed out every. single. cow. she. saw. for days on end. “Oh look, a cow!! … Oh, wow, look guys! A cow!”
Whereas I saw the first cow, thought “oh, dairy land I guess” and immediately stopped paying attention to every other cow.
Meanwhile my daughter is incredibly bad at looking for things she wants. I attribute it also to a lack of filtering. Also, an extremely low frustration tolerance.
I'm not a parent but my first thought - is the primary thing of interest in these interactions the object, or a known/trusted adult's reaction to the object?
Over a long enough time span a child shouting when he sees various things might pick up a lot of info from the reaction of adults - maybe not apparent at the time but over time I bet it reinforces.
"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" seems like a cultural encoding of this idea - learning to properly report risks as a basic value. A child who shouts "lion" and gets a big reaction learns a lot about how to respond to lions as opposed to "antelope".
When I saw the email for this post I thought maybe you were weighing in on one or more of the ongoing crises. This is much better, at least for my happiness.
Every two year old will giggle at the line from Leonard Cohen “the moon swims nakedly”. And adults will smile. The definition of poetry is - familiar words put together differently. Every good heart loves that.
Scott, your children are beautiful, and your writing is wonderful. I was both charmed and greatly amused. Thank you!
P. S. Around 1985, Dave Barry wrote a fine column about his then-5-year-old son Robert approaching older German tourists on the beach, and insisting that Dad inform the Germans that he, Robert, was a particular type of dinosaur.
That's it, though edited a bit for the collection. It was the first Dave Barry column I ever read, and I'm almost certain it appeared in our local broadsheet in late 1985.
There's an old Scott comment about how if you want to write nonfiction well, use microhumor (among others), and he explicitly named Dave Barry as a master of this.
About the time I reached the "demented leprechaun" part of this post, I started thinking that Scott had somehow merged with Dave Barry. That is a high compliment in my book.
Also: "I tried to explain that this wasn’t Jonah the babysitter, but I don't know if it sunk in." Heh.
Being a fan of Matt Farley who has seen him live, I don't think "mildly scummy" accurately describes him. It's not that he's looking to make a quick buck, but rather that he feels compelled to spend every waking moment creating art, and found a way to turn his compulsion into a living. The fact that he also makes many micro-budget independent films for tiny audiences demonstrates that he's not in it for the money.
Sorry, I should've clarified: Matt Farley is "The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over", as well as "The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee", "The Toilet Bowl Cleaners", and many many other musical aliases.
I am really rooting for Kai, he is one of life's rare birds.
With how clever your kids seem to be, I heartily recommend audiobooks for times when you're not able to read to them, many kids can follow audiobooks that are a tier up from what's "age-appropriate" for them to look at and they really like it.
2nd this, my 3 year old son similarly likes to flip to certain pages in a book and fights attempts to read them in any kind of linear order but he loooooves the audiobook of Dr. Seuss's Fox in Sox, so that's often playing in the car when Daniel Tiger is mysteriously unavailable.
Their real names aren't Kai and Lyra. I don't know how much this will help (especially since these have become their IRL nicknames). I may lock or even hide these posts later, if they ask me to.
That's good, though I feel like it should maybe be the other way around (the posts stay hidden until and unless they give you permission to publish them).
Yes. No child will be comfortable with strangers knowing that they were inarticulate and unpredictably eccentric at the age of two. That trauma could never be repaired. Ever.
It definitely doesn't describe literally every single child in the history of humanity.
I don't expect it to be traumatising. It just seems more polite to ask first.
If I wanted to publish an article about a friend of mine online and put their picture in it, I should ask them for permission before doing that. If they are currently unable to answer the question, because they're on a very long vacation or something, I think I should default to not publishing until they're back and can give me permission.
My mother has never hesitated to recount the things I did as a baby. She particularly seems to enjoy telling my girlfriends when there is an opportunity. Irrecoverable trauma, though I think it's more or less universal.
Jeff Vogel did the Story About the Baby and the Story About the Toddler and basically stopped writing about his kid once she started being a person rather than a collection of not-THAT-unique impulses.
"Respecting Toddler Privacy
I am often asked if I think writing this somehow violates Cordelia’s privacy. The answer is no. I don’t say anything about her that is not true for pretty much every child. All children cry, all children squish bugs, and all children SHOULD squish bugs. There are some things she has done that I feel could be considered private, and I have not written about them, even when they were funny."
I think you're well within that. Also, as long as they don't consciously remember it's not likely to induce teeth-grinding cringing in them, whereas if my parent's publicized some of the shit I remember doing as a child I might have to become a hermit out of self-respect. Nor does anything you've mentioned above seem like something that could be used to mock them socially. Is fine.
My dad made similar blog posts on his kids’ antics up until a certain age (things would usually fade out by 10 when we were more identifiable and less ridiculous.) His father kept small notebooks of quotes of funny things each of *his* sons said (one book per kid.) My own reaction was that this was a normal thing to do growing up and I often found them a source of amusement rather than embarrassing. Maybe because by age 10 or so you’re less identified with a toddler version of yourself and are more grown up?
Embarrassment is a possibility especially if the thing adults are laughing about was something you did say, last week. But otherwise I found the esoteric ramblings (including say numerical models of how many words I’d learned) to be amusing and a sign of attentiveness.
On the (relatively few) occasions where my parents talked about my early childhood antics in social contexts where I was a teen or young adult, I remember being vaguely annoyed not by telling about the antics themselves, but because (mostly my dad specially) seemed to conceptualize this as him participating in an important social ritual of embarassing teenage-me by telling stories of me as a young child doing funny young child things. Most of which I was too young to remember anyway. What I do remember was my dad telling these stories with a shit-eating grin in social situations I didn't necessarily want to be at to begin with, and expecting me to have some kind of reaction to learning that I reacted in some childishly cute and funny way to something when I was three years old.
Yeah, when it's meant to provoke a reaction from the child or is something genuinely embarrassing to the present person, that's not ideal. My parents have occasionally embarrassed me by telling stories of me being adorable where I remember thinking I was being cute and thus it is acutely embarrassing now, but other than that it's mostly either stuff from before I was conscious or things that are genuinely amusing.
For example, they apparently decided to back off on manners when I was asked if it was raining and responded 'no thank you.' This continues to slightly amuse me to this day.
> My first guess was that one of the twins had gotten their hands on a phone and dialed random things, but neither my nor my wife’s call history showed anything incriminating.
You can call make an emergency call from any cell phone without unlocking it. I assume that calls 911, but since the phone is locked, it must not rely on the 'Phone' app, so it makes sense that it wouldn't show up in that app's call history.
Incidentally, you can even make emergency calls from a cell phone that you're not paying any cell service provider for. 911 is special!
The Internet confusingly shows two conflicting claims:
People are puzzled that their 911 calls are not shown up in their phone call logs. Other people comment this is totally normal and by design to protect someone in a domestic abuse situation.
People ask why their 911 calls show up in their call logs, they thought they were suppressed. Other people comment this is totally normal and how could it be anything different!? You make a call, of course it is in the call logs.
I suspect different phone manufacturers, operating system versions, network providers and plain old bugs muddle the water.
For iPhones this is triggering emergency calls even if locked:
> If you've got kids or have a tendency to fidget with your iPhone, it's quite common to call emergency services by mistake. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to prevent the Emergency SOS feature from accidentally activating, while still keeping the feature available in case of an actual emergency.
Interesting! But in Scott's case it doesn't sound like he thinks the twins could have intentionally dialed 911 — his theory was that they were dialing random numbers — so whether or not his phone would suppress 911 from call logs in all cases, I think in this case they must have triggered the "emergency call" feature.
That tip at the end is very nice! I'll have to look into whether my phone has something like that.
I have a two-year-old. Tears of laughter are streaming down my face from how relatable large portions of this post are. (My little guy is intermediate between your two on how much he does a lot of these.)
Grandma of a 26-month-old here. It goes without saying that I relish your every post about toddlers!
But one quibble: I don't agree that toddlers are hard-wired to learn animal names and noises. Rather, the baby book/toy/clothing industrial complex imposes this on them. So, so, so many books about animal noises! And the rug in our nursery features jungle animals, including a cheetah and a sloth. (I've had to be very careful not to misidentify cheetahs as leopards, and vice versa.) I think it's a leftover from when nearly everybody worked on a farm, but now it's just weird. My granddaughter never even saw a cow until about two weeks ago, much less a sloth.
Consider color names: they’re equally pushed by the baby-stuff industrial complex, but are not particularly important (to be able to name) from an evolutionary perspective.
My toddler is much more obsessed with them than with animal sounds.
Funny - my kids are so bad at this that actually just this morning my wife and I did did an impromptu pedigree trace to figure out whether it was possible that my son had inherited his great-grandfather's color blindness.
(answer: seems like no, would have to follow a non-standard inheritance pattern)
I think it's evolutionarily selected by what tended to successfully get attention from parents. Ancestral parents probably tended to be more responsive to animal callouts, so children that did this got slightly more food/safety.
It might also be that you have trained them directly, if you are more responsive to certain callouts than others. They'd probably learn very quickly which call is most likely to get you to respond.
We had the same experience, and actually discovered that there *is* a history of red-green colour blindness on both my and my wife's side!
...but no, my oldest was just terrible with colours. It really stood out though versus her facility with animals (and cars/trains/airplanes/boats, which I'm pretty sure like you fit into the same mental slot).
I've been wondering the same thing with my two year old daughter. She's even adopted an alternative meaning to "red" and "blue" in place of "this" or "that". When she wants something she asks for the "blue" one, regardless of the color. I'll point to my best guess and either I'm lucky and correct, or she says "no the red one". If I'm wrong again it's back to the "blue" one, her displeasure multiplying with each guess.
I have a bunch of Chris Farrie’s Science for Babies book, and just give it a year. My 3 year old loves his books. Not as much as Pokemon, so your animal identification idea still holds water, but once he’s in the why phase, those books are golden.
She likes animals and animal noises, but I think cares more about colors, oddly. She has an need to line them up roygbiv, and I have no idea where she even learned that; when building with blocks or dressing herself, no color can touch itself.
Decades ago I remember my cousin and I took our children to the zoo. Hers was a young toddler in a stroller, not very verbal, who had brought along her toddler book of zoo animals.
She seemed a little unhappy with the proceedings.
At each stop, her mother would say, “Look at the - (giraffe, lion, anteater)!” And she would refuse to submit to look but instead furiously try to find a page with the animal and if found, say “Book! Book! Book” in a stubbornly aggrieved way.
I am not especially interested in children but was genuinely curious what was going on in her head.
Maybe it would be best to let children know the few animals in their world - dogs, cats, squirrels, occasional farm animal, potbellied pig or goose on a leash (sigh) - so that they can marvel over the diversity of them later, as I recall (?) the Ingallses did in one of the Little House books, an illustrated book of animals furnishing one of their few windows on the world.
I think you have the causation reversed here. The industrial complex does not cares whatsoever about pushing any sort of agenda other than "buy stuff". They want money, so they make things that sell. Animal books sell, so they make them. It's not necessarily obvious whether they sell because children genuinely want them (more than other books) or because parents think children want them and get confirmation biased when the children care, or because parents get more enthusiastic about sharing them which makes the child care, or some other convoluted chain of causation. But at the end of the day, they sell. They sell a lot, so they make a lot.
My niece, at about four, constantly got out of bed and came downstairs. Thirsty. Hungry. Heard a sound. Any excuse. One night my brother-in-law laid down the law. “Do NOT come down again unless it’s an emergency.”
Ten minutes later, she appears.
“Is this an emergency?”
“Yes!”
“What is it?”
“Do you know how to do this?” [makes upside-down finger goggles]
A friend’s toddler used to do something similar after he’d been put to bed. He would grab up various articles of clothing and adorn himself in a “humorous” way and come into their living room as if he were doing an after-dinner act. Like he was going to razzle-dazzle them.
I propose using Suno (or some equivalent music generating AI) to make custom songs for your kids. I don't know how well it handles children's music, but I really like the ability to take things that I care about or inside jokes or events that actually happened to me and my family and turn them into songs about those things. It's especially good if you write your own lyrics rather than having the AI do it, though that takes a bit more effort.
Sure, you can find songs about the moon or a bus, but you're not going to find a song about "Kai driving a bus on the moon while Lyra eats moonberries in the back seat" unless you make it yourself, and I bet they'd appreciate it if you can convince the AI to make the tune good enough.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, Jeff Vogel's Story About the Baby and Story About the Toddler may amuse you. Or not, I'm not the boss of you.
It is the source of what I think may be the smartest bit of parenting insight ever: "You can tell parenting is incredibly frustrating because they have to tell you not to shake the baby."
My grandson son mastered Alexa just after his 3rd b-day. He likes weather reports. For toddler reading I recommend "the big orange splot" which was enjoyed by my kids and now grandkids. Also George Washington's Cows". Most of the Berenstein Bears books are also a hit. I have a low shelf so kids can choose what they want.
I'm surprised you say this - if anything, I worry I'm only writing about the hard and annoying parts.
If you mean "you're making me optimistic that many of the hard and annoying parts will be hilarious", that one's true, although more true in retrospect or when you're reading about them happening to someone else.
I'm going to sound like a curmudgeon here, but pretty much everything in this post sounds like it would be unpleasant to actually experience in the role of the parent. The post is mostly about toddlers screaming - I chuckle at my mental image of the toddlers screaming at Scott, but it doesn't make me want to have a toddler scream at me.
I personally know several people who seem to love parenting toddlers (although not necessarily during the time the toddlers are screaming) but I thought that this was due to some mind-controlling effect that only functioned through sustained direct exposure.
A friend of mine asked me just before they had a baby, “but how is the diaper changing? Is it.. really difficult?” And I had to think for a bit to remember that diapers were a thing. It’s wild — as parents you are essential immune to it. These (beautifully written) things above are happening 30+ times a day FOR YEARS, and it is so easy compared to the actually difficult stuff (orchestrating friend meetups, navigating school choices, staying present), it’s really not on our minds at all.
I thought diapers would be annoying, and I mean, it is annoying how many there are, but it's not really gross. I far prefer changing diapers to dealing with the cat's litter box. I'll happily change dozens of diapers in exchange for my wife handling the stupid litter box.
It's hard to tell how much exaggeration for comedic effect there is here (An enormous amount or only a large amount?), but even accounting for that this struck me as overly permissive parenting resulting in poorly behaved kids.
*One's own* toddler definitely has some sort of magical spell where fairly mundane or even obnoxious behaviour becomes utterly delightful, but overall I think a lot of the enjoyableness of my kids comes from a mixture being lucky with their natural temperament & deliberate work moulding their behaviour so that it is normally pleasant.
>I also have three kids, although mine are now much older. One was a challenge at this age, one was a breeze, and one was a hellcat. A lot comes down to genetics and luck. I don’t read “permissive parenting” and “poor behavior” here. I read one easy kid and one challenging kid who are TWINS! Some kids truly are more difficult than others to parent. From your name I’m going to assume you’re a man, so maybe the term “mommy wars” means little to you. But I lived through the mommy wars, and it’s often best not to make judgments about how others are parenting. P
I should have added more caveats about how I have no concerns for Scott's kids and this is all probably well within the window of perfectly acceptable parenting.
It really is fun and hilarious! Some more frustration, but a lot more joy. It's just that the frustration is stuff anyone can relate to, whereas relating the joy is like trying to explain romantic love to a pre-pubertal child. Even if they're very bright, they're still unlikely to really *get* it.
The main upshot is that "sibling rivalry" etc has plausible evolutionary justifications, rather than just being obviously an evolutionary mistake, or random flukes.
(To be clear I'm usually fairly skeptical of evo-psych stuff, just one interesting model among many).
Yeah, we're familiar. The twins seem to like each other a lot, though. On the rare occasions when one of them is missing, the present one constantly asks where they are. This isn't to say there are no fights, but overall they're pretty positive on one another. Sometimes they will even give up rare toys or food to the other, if they expect them to like it more. Which I guess is also what evolutionary theory would predict.
The blossoming friendship between my toddlers (not twins but close together) has been *by far* the most rewarding thing of the past two years for me. Not even close. Right now they're cuddled up on the sofa under a blanket with the older reading a book to the younger one.
Very cute. Also: I don’t think children hear the difference in their own speech? I apparently had a speech impediment enough such that they tried to correct it at school with a speech therapist one year in grade school, and throughout I remember trying to please her while not being able to hear what she was telling me I was doing.
I don't know how they found it, but our kids were the ones who discovered "Yum Yum Breakfast Burrito" and the classic, "It's Raining Tacos". They also love to play inane video game music, but they know they'll only get away with that when the parents aren't around because we generously use our veto.
I also recommend, "What does the Fox Say?" as a song for that age.
After 38 years of no children - falling in love a few years prior means I have 17 & 16 year old young men as children so I’ll be sure to start handing out ideas and information and thoughts in oh 14-15 more years.
Kai is correct, the moon *is* objectively the most wonderful and beautiful thing in the entire universe 😁
Songs about mothers seem to be extremely sentimental in every culture. Fathers don't seem to get the same level of attention, the only thing I can (hesitantly) recommend is the JCB Song from about twenty years ago:
The only song I've ever come across that is extremely sentimental towards Dads is "Daughter" by Loudon Wainwright.
The Dad is not actually mentioned, but the subject matter and the male voice singing it makes it an extremely sentimental, very simple, song about Dad's. And sentimental in a good way. I'd recommend it to Scott if he's looking for a good Dad song that sentimentally expresses the feeling of being a Dad.
"That my Daughter in the water, everytime she fell I caught her. Everytime she fell....."
Oh, and they don’t ONLY sabotage each other’s education. They sabotage everything. Also they’re each other’s best friends. And if you accidentally try to put the wrong color shoes or pants on a twin* there will be bloody vengeance wrecked upon you.
*because my twins are identical they have color coded soft pants and shoes. Nacho is navy, Gus is green or gray. There is a MNEMONIC for identifying my twins which my entire parish now knows.
I was about to question how often this song would be relevant to you but I remember being in 2nd grade and singing it on the playground for in the middle of winter, so I guess the appeal is universal.
I'm fascinated by the idea that you have standard pairings with the twins (you/Kai, mom/Lyra). I would have thought that the obvious thing to do would be to deliberately switch it up so no one bonds more with one rather than the other, either just alternating or doing it by some similar mechanism (e.g. if some of the pair-offs are caused by gender (each taking the appropriate twin to the bathroom or something), then have the same-sex parent do that and switch off for all the others). I am assuming that you thought this through and came to a different conclusion (and as a father of only one child I certainly don't mean to suggest my idea is better). Can you explain what's behind your thinking?
A lot of it was child-driven - they each seem to vibe more with one parent. And it's useful to have a Schelling solution of who takes point on each child so we're not constantly litigating it.
We had the same; it just worked out that way. They're fine with either of us if it's solo parenting time, but given the choice they vibe more with one (luckily different one).
This reminds me of a friend of mine's story of when they picked up their kids after a week with their grandparents. His three year old daughter ran up to him excitedly and went "daddy daddy look! It's mommy!"
Playing Guess-the-song is great fun. One or two are easy - my kid uses "wise men say" for Can't Help Falling in Love With You. But then you get "battle noise" (Two Little Boys) and the other day we tore our hair out trying to guess "princess song". It turned out to be Love Story by Taylor Swift. Also "'nother cracker" morphs effortlessly into Frère Jacques and back.
On the emergency thread -- when my oldest was between 2 and 3 I took him to our community center to swim. In the locker room, a very large man was also getting ready for the pool. My son pointed directly at him and started yelling "Fat man! Fat man!" in the same type of unstoppable loop you described applying to buses and trains.
I'd successfully blocked that memory out until now, so thanks for that! :)
I remember going to a garage sale in the early 80s with my first son. We did not watch television but you know, kids pick up on things very easily. We walked in and there was a short, slender black man looking items over. At the time there was maybe 5% black people in our community. He looked at him and said, "Look! It's Mr. T!!!"
I have seared in my own memory an incident when, answering a knock on the door, I called out to an older brother, “Your friend is here.” Which one, he called back. Not meaning rudeness, but very rudely obviously, I called back: “The fat one.”
My brother was embarrassed and I was swiftly disciplined by my mother.
I can make myself feel bad about this at any time in the intervening almost fifty years.
It was truly terrible.
But it occurs to me oddly for the first time, that Miss Manners type training for all of us would have prevented the situation.
I should have been taught to answer the door in a formal and polite manner, and certainly my brother should have been taught not to demand who the visitor was in his hearing (a close friend actually!).
Hello. Please come in. I will go get my brother, etc.
One of my boys used to read Miss Manners and he'd bring the choice sections to us at dinner and we'd just laugh and laugh. She was so very clever and funny.
Much older parent here. Advice you didn't ask for: I would take away Alexa. Immediate gratification is very bad for little children. Delayed gratification is essential to live a good life, to be a good person, to be a good friend, sibling, parent, spouse, human. I also taught my children formal manners at an early age. You will not be sorry if you do this.
Sure. A child says "I WANT MY SONG!!!" and the parent says, "Yes, that is a very nice song. I'll play it for you after lunch and before your nap, but right now, I'm busy doing adult things."
Or you say, "I'll set a timer, and you go pick up your toys and then we will play the song if your toys are picked up by the time it goes off. Otherwise, we will need to wait until after naps. It can be your 'waking up from naps' song."
A child wants a book that another child has. There is a metric ton of memetic desire in childhood. You say, "You can have that book when he is done. You have to wait." Or you could say, "I know you want that book right now, but if you can say to me, "Mama, I can wait until he is done to have that book" then I will make sure you get it next. If you can't say that, if you can't wait nicely, then we will try again tomorrow for the book."
Kids having access to something that gives them exactly what they want instantly is just training them for selfishness and self-absorption. You basically hardwire frustration and narcissism into how they interact with this magic world that gives them what they want, or weirdly does NOT give them what they want. When you raise children, you need to remember you are really raising adults. You have to keep in mind what the appropriate mature approach would be when you deal with things like this - and it isn't giving in or responding to the tyranny of a 3 year old as though they are in charge. I'm not saying Scott is doing that, but I am saying that Alexa is not good for children to have access to. And nipping selfishness in the bud always pays off later.
Ah, making it sound so easy, like someone who's forgotten what it's like!
I used to believe it was worth at least trying to follow advice like this, and then I met my actual children and realised that not only were they not blank slates ready to receive training, they in fact came with a full suite of programming for manipulating my own behaviour.
And these routines are independent of the ones they activate in other contexts. So when I "train" them to delay gratification, all that amounts to is a detail in the ongoing negotiation that is their relationship with me. It has very little to no impact on their behaviour in any other context, nevermind their personality.
I do what I outlined here on the regular with my grandchildren. I've been deeply involved in raising my own grandchildren since before my youngest started formal schooling. So I've had 45 non-stop years of raising little children. Several of my own grown children use these techniques. I will admit, of course, that your milage may vary from child to child. Some kids adapt well to reason. Some kids consider it an opportunity to leverage the fact that you are engaged with them to just hammer you down. Other kids decide that your little list of things you want is their most important list of things they do not want. I'm not saying it is easy, TTLX. I am saying it is necessary in order to civilize little human beings.
Also....you are absolutely right. They are NOT blank slates. They come with distinct personalities and I am always surprised with each new grandchild how different they all are.
“Let’s see if we can tidy everything up first, and THEN we can do X.”
“We can’t read another book now because you’re really sleepy, but why don’t you choose which one you want, and we’ll leave it on the table, and then it’ll be ready to read when you wake up.”
I sort of get the impression that in affluent families made up of “exceptional” individuals, there is less of a feeling of constraint in this way. Like, we must instead teach them what having it all means, i.e. their lives will of course involve summoning Alexa for whatever they want; to pretend otherwise is perverse.
I agree with you about Alexa, for the stated reasons and perhaps another involving a tendency to make things less tranquil than they might be (admittedly a long shot with these two); but I don’t know how else to explain that your advice will probably seem contrarian and hopelessly retro to this crowd.
This is an interesting thought experiment for me. I did know kids raised in higher strata families, but this was half a century ago. Their parents, largely, had high expectations for them, and mostly they were good students and decent people. A little stuck up at times, but not too badly. A few of them went on to lives lived poorly. A few of them went on to become pretty successful and very stuck up. The really conservative ones went on to be successful, hard-working, creative, and interesting. Again. . . this was in another world.
Yeah, I'm unsure whether teaching delayed gratification, good manners, patience etc. at a young age has a huge effect on adult personality, but I'm very convinced that it makes kids much nicer to be around when they're a couple of years older.
It's really important for children to be polite and pleasant. People enjoy being around children who are. Even if it is just play acting at first, I think it eventually becomes habitual enough to be helpful. And it helps shy children to have a script.
Having just got out of this phase, I thoroughly enjoyed this read. My twins just turned 4 and there's still some drama, but much, much less than a year ago where every single thing could lead to explosions. (How many arguments I had about which kid wants which spoon for oatmeal, and whether I should give them the spoon or they want to take it out themselves. Terrible reactions if you got this slightly wrong...)
I remember the biggest win was when it was possible for one parent to do bedtime on their own. This used to be impossible. But when one parent could do it on their own (some time before three years old I think) sometimes one of us could go out to work events or meet with friends again. Only rarely though, it was still a major drag for the other parent. And when both parents were home then both had to be fully involved in bedtime. Now at 4 years old it's pretty easy to get them to bed as one parent.
I will say though about that "no diaper change": our twins also refused to put on diapers at night time. So after they had turned two years old we gave them a chance to go without and they were potty-trained surprisingly quickly. It was 90% the kids pushing us to stop using diapers, not the other way round. So maybe just humor him and see how he does.
Strong recommend for Sandra Boynton's music! She can write every genre, Gregorian chant to show tunes to blues, and it's something the kids will listen to a zillion times, but the parents won't care because it's actually good.
Re: MUZZKA, my oldest, after a few failed attempts to say something understandable, would preface her unintelligible statement with "Ohhh!" because that was what we said when we'd finally figure it out and she thought that was the magic understanding word.
Yours are still a bit young for it, but I instituted "days" for each kid. We call it "coffee button day" because that was why I started it, so they wouldn't fight over who got to start my coffee in the morning, but it covers everything: who picks what we listen to in the car, who gets their book read first (or last if going last is the hot commodity), who gets the mail, who gets that one plate that doesn't match the rest, etc. I don't have to remember which of the six did the thing last, and I can just say "whose day is it?" when there's one of those minor-but-daily arguments. The leftover day is when Mom and Dad get what they want, that is, when there's not someone young enough to just rule; we once spent the *entirety* of a 3-hour car trip listening to "We Didn't Start the Fire" as that was what the toddler loved.
Since you don’t know how the 911 call happened, a theory:
iPhones have this feature where if you hold the lock button and volume up button for like ten seconds or so it’ll call emergency services. Helpful in some circumstances but easy to trigger accidentally. Last time I accidentally did it, it played a loud siren which let me cut the call in time, but a toddler might just see that as encouragement.
A quick AI search suggests something similar but easier to trigger exists on some Android phones: on Google Pixel you just mash the power button 5 times.
This is so interesting about the whole animal sounds thing. My son has level three autism and he's 12. He is still obsessed with any sound, and you can't just ignore the request for the sound that something makes--even something that doesn't make sounds. So even at church one Sunday, and on others since he first asked, he questioned, "what does the cross say?" He was referring to the brown wooden cross attached to the wall in the front of the church behind the pastor. So I said "creeeek" in a whisper. This seemed to satisfy him. He also loves music and can remember songs really quickly, along with rhythm and. I think the sounds and songs things are related.
My kids both went through a phase when they were pretty young where every time my wife and I touched each other, much less kissed or hugged, they'd interrupt and try to get our attention or physically push us apart. The idea of twins sabotaging each other's education feels completely plausible given this clear attempt to sabotage future siblings.
Kai does this too. "Daddy no pet mommy!" he declares, as soon as we sit next to each other. Sometimes unsuccessfully tries to drag one of us off. Lyra is much more chill about this, for whatever reason.
Regarding the speech recognition problem: I desperately searched for a way to give the voice assistant device pre-prompts (like "children live here, if in doubt, play one of the following songs"). My current setup consists of a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant, their speech recognition device, and an OpenAI plugin. Not perfect, but it works reasonably well.
Using the same setup and a little bit of vibecoding, I created a dashboard that displays all favorite songs and audiobooks as images/buttons. You just have to click on them and then the stuff gets played. That was a much bigger game changer, and I highly recommend it.
My child's equivalent of this was badgering any phone she got access to for pictures of bats: "Otay doodoo, tow me pitah a bat" ("Ok google, show me pictures of bats")
I didn't have the variety of kids who are obsessed with Truck Tunes, but it's a hit for audiences who want songs about cement mixers etc. https://www.youtube.com/@twentytrucks
Is Alexa, on balance, helpful when dealing with toddlers? We've never set one up - (though we have a few that were gifted to us) - this post isn't exactly inspiring me with the feeling that I'm missing out, even ignoring the potential 9-1-1 call... (And I can't really throw stones as I did that once as a kid in the landline era, too)
It's not like we can avoid our child being aware of Alexa as a concept, since the local grandparents use them. Will be interesting once they start talking and see if they try to trigger Alexa at home, I guess.
The usual rule is that giving toddlers any type of nice thing will make your life harder because they'll keeping pushing your limits until they've demanded more than you're willing to give, and you should only do it insofar as you like seeing them happy when they get it. I think Alexa is in this category. But it is really cute when they do little dances to their favorite songs.
Exception if you already play them lots of music and they already demand more, in which case Alexa will just make your job there easier. I do hate it though, it finds a bunch of scummy ways to advertise to you, and it's really hard to set it to "don't interrupt me all the time with Amazon ads" mode. I only allow it in the house at all because my wife finds it helpful.
Fun fact - that Veggie Tales Jonah and the Whale song had a cult following among my high school class. One English teacher, who taught a Nature of Language elective class and was also a Lutheran minister, liked to use her own twins as case studies of language acquisition. I think she showed a video of them trying to sing it, or something. It got to the point that random people would start singing it in the hall and others would join in, and once someone managed to get it played over the PA system on a Friday afternoon.
Clearly there's some deep kabbalistic connection involving twins, linguistics, and the exegesis of the Jonah story, and music. In any case, I can't figure it out, I'm to busy singing and rapping it to my cat. Thankfully my wife is not here. The cat is not amused.
> I now think we’ll discover their long-sought ‘boy-friendly teaching methods’ around the same time we finally eliminate the ‘bro culture’ that prevents women from winning exactly 50% of physics Nobels.
Certainly it'll never happen as long as both genders are treated the same in the classroom, or even allowed in the same classes for that matter. Boys require a firm hand to be made to understand where they stand in the hierarchy. They lack the restraint to respect boundaries by default. The same applies to your kids, of course, though that's ultimately your loss.
Hot take: temperament and neurotype really are what gender is cracked up to be. You’re correct that different people have different essential natures, and their education/upbringing *has* to be shaped around that.
The Barbie/Ken system gets this dreadfully wrong in many cases, though. Please read more deeply into queer, neurodivergent, and hormonally atypical brains! They’re more common than you might think.
For example, at least a quarter of males have the HSP neurotype, which means they’re more “conventionally feminine” for social, educational, and disciplinary purposes. That sizable minority does very poorly when their peers and elders are only willing to see binary “girls” and “boys”.
Dr. Elaine Aron’s books are a good place to start learning about this. She’s the seminal researcher who developed the HSP framework.
The toddler boss will be a bit of a challenge to the feminised society.
> "Boys require a firm hand to be made to understand where they stand in the hierarchy. They lack the restraint to respect boundaries by default."
Nah. Historically and evolutionarily, boys and young men had been pretty good in finding their places in the hierarchy - which much less hassle than stereotypes dramatize. And you should check both modern sides on respecting the boundaries.
Gender equality maxing seems logical and virtuous. But consequences are bubbling up, as the first generations of max validated girls and earnestly shamed boys are growing up. We will learn more about "unfettered" women than Freud and Schopenhauer.
Lyra did once randomly decide to stick her fingers in my mouth. In retrospect this was on a day where I had eaten an inordinate amount of berries, which she might have been trying to rescue me from.
My daughter at age 2 did that when she woke up before me and found me sleeping. She’d stick her little fingers gently into my mouth, my nose, my ears. I think she was trying to find me.
I'm a guy and I have a twin sister. I remember approximately nothing from being a toddler, but a lot of this feels pretty familiar from what I do remember from being kids, especially the parts about reading. She read a lot, way more than I did, and I didn't think there was anything wrong with this, exactly, but I did want Things to Happen, and sometimes that made it hard to read. Because if Things weren't Happening, I would cause them to Happen. One time, I absolutely needed to know what Happens when you drip water on a lightbulb, so I tried it. It exploded (well, maybe imploded), because this was decades ago and it was an incandescent lightbulb. I thought this was fantastic because Something Happened, but she was pretty pissed off at me, for a while after.
I'm not sure there's a tidy way to summarize how this went as we got older, except that she was better at school and I was better at things like mountain biking, getting minor injuries. And I admired her ability to... tend to things? I am still a little envious that she's read so many more books than I have.
I’m 99.8th-percentile Autistic. I didn’t get identified until my thirties. With that in mind, I am *begging* you to consider that these are neurodivergent tells. I’m obviously biased, but they seem like glowing neon signs to me.
Life is so different when family and child have a container for all of this—the dysregulation, quirks, inscrutable requirements, fixative attachments, perseveration, alien axiology, transition resistance, constant bloody-murder distress… From the inside, what’s going on is a system of hidden (but real!) neurological needs that “normal protocols” rub against like a cheese grater. Environmental adjustments and some (unintuitive but eventually learnable) cross-cognitive empathy can make a *world* of difference for everyone’s outcomes and sanity. A dreaded but extremely common failure mode is for families to think that all of these puzzling differences are some sort of maturational or moral failure, or a comic punchline—depending on how pissed-off others feel—and to treat them as disciplinary issues. That’s a fast path to profound, chronic psychological injury and hermeneutical poverty for the kid. Please, PLEASE check out the possible Autism angle! 🙏
I’m happy to provide more information, resources, and articulate interior commentary if any of that would be helpful.
It’s possible you’re right and I’m raising a false alarm. Also, it’s common for families/communities to explain away all the signs as “just normal XYZ behavior” or basically any narrative that dodges a deeper look at neurodivergence. I’m not certain what’s true here, but I’m certain the question should be investigated seriously. The consequences of a false negative are quite serious. Source: it happened to me.
If Scott’s kids are acting this way in a couple years, something’s amiss. But right now, what they’re doing is normal behavior. It’s sort of like incontinence — normal now, definitely abnormal for older kids.
With all due respect, I appreciated your "every possible personality trait is caused by General Hyperreactivity Syndrome" speech at whichever conference it was you gave that at, but it doesn't make me confident that you have high sensitivity and specificity in diagnosing people with things.
It makes me feel weird to keep commenting on posts about your family but since it’s always good to hear it: cute kids and sounds like you’re doing a good job.
"Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot. And there ain't any real difference between triplets and an insurrection." - Mark Twain, Speech on the Babies
In short term, two children are more work than one. In long term, two children are less work than one, because they will spend a lot of time playing together, while the only child would always want to interact with you.
When exactly the long term starts, probably depends a lot on the age difference between the children. So I would guess that for twins it starts earlier. Probably at 4 or 5 years?
Sounds like kittens. As a childfree old with 5 cats, I tend to mentally relate all small children stories with cat behavior and there are some definite similarities, though thankfully fewer constant emergencies.
“Unfortunately, Kai has been reading the How To Be A Toddler books, and they all say that you should never, under any circumstances, stop crying” One of our twins must have read the “How to Be an Extreme Toddler” version - if we let them cry for more than 5 minutes they would inevitably start vomiting due to some strange sensitive gag reflex interaction with intense crying. Bluff called. We obviously did not end up doing any form of cry it out 😂
I believe you are right with your evolutionary anthropology theory of antelope spotting. I would only add it does not go far enough. Our forebears in the african savannah, lacking the right physiology to be stealthy or to outright fight the lions, naturally took the other competitive strategy available, intimidation; just like the hyenas. We were the noisiest, smelliest motherfuckers in the savannah, and throwing stones to boot. That's why we whoop and raise our arms after our team scored a goal: instincts for shooing scavengers away from our kill.
In the wild, the loudness of another animal's voice is great evidence for the size of its lung and upper body. Very loud voices elicit flight responses... and shouting or singing IN UNISON hijacks that! For humans it even comes with a substantial oxytocin release, giving us a physiological incentive to keep doing that winning strategy of collective intimidation.
That explains why toddlers are making so much noise: they're instinctively doing their part! But of course the next step for them is to learn to do it unanimously, in unison, because that shoos away the lions more effectively.
A hail of many stones would get
a lion to turn back.
Collective shouts could voice a threat
a single voice would lack.
The parenting upshot is that there's a big difference between just hearing songs, and singing along with them. The latter leads to much more harmonious situations, in my extensive experience.
I wanted to say thanks for years of insight — your earlier essays really helped me build better mental models of how the world works. Lately I’ve found myself missing that more zoomed-out, pattern-focused style, as the writing often feels centered on ongoing US/AI emergency framing.
One small, personal example that came to mind while reading The Permanent Emergency: as young parents with our first child, the instructions to the babysitter were basically “call immediately if the baby seems unhappy.” Years later, with our second child, they were closer to “don’t call unless there’s blood.” Experience shifted our sense of risk, proportion, and what actually matters.
I’ve always valued your ability to step back and explain those kinds of patterns rather than react to the latest crisis, and I hope we’ll see more of that mode again — I think many other readers would welcome it too.
I know what you mean but I don't think that's necessarily a good idea. I mean there are only so many good big picture mental model ideas that one person can have during a time period and the authors who start trying to force that stuff end up much worse.
He's writing a great deal more now so not everything can be an insight boiled down from years of experience.
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Regarding your example I think that raises a very important point -- the same instructions mean very different things to different people. For instance, an introverted highly anxious and self-critical person like Scott Aaronson hears the way we talk about male sexual attraction to women and feels guilty about even thinking that he might be interested in someone while saying anything more nuanced seems to lead other young men to think "yah she totally wants me to send her this dick pic"
I think a big issue in our current society is that looser social connections and mass media make messages far less targeted to the individual. Some babysitters will hear the later message and not call anyone if it's not arterial spray others will call for the slightest scratch. If you know your babysitter you can tailor the instructions.
Interesting points, and I largely agree. That said, a bit less alarmism—and fewer “catastrophe of the minute” takes—would be very welcome, not just for me.
One idea: Scott could tag posts more explicitly (e.g. futurism, mental models, parenting, alarmism, AI-will-kill-us-soon). That would make it easier for readers to decide whether to dive in or skip a post, without diluting the content itself.
I found this post very entertaining, but would enjoy a “wisdom” post on child rearing - however, I expect I will be dead by the time he is ready to discourse on that.
This was so relatable! I have a lot of the same difficulties as you with my children. Interestingly, my wife gets better outcomes. I'm puzzled by the difference in our experiences.
One possibility is that she just has better vibes. My daughters demands will eventually make me lose my cool on some level and even if I don't articulate it that emotional reaction comes through and our daughter knows she's making headway in the power struggle or feels unsafe.
Another is that she has an incredible bullshit detector. I have to parse each toddler request for more food or milk as potentially valid while my wife confidently and consistently rejects almost every attempt at stalling. She is a brick wall with chill vibes and our daughter feels safe in the knowledge that the bedtime routine will happen according to the plan. There is no way to insert an emergency. This is a hard road as sometimes demands for food, water, additional affection, or urban jungle identification have to be dismissed out of time as illegitimate at this time. I think our toddlers feel safer understanding their place in the hierarchy with her than with me.
This confidence, consistently, and good vibes is really hard for me to emulate. It's a lot of soft skills and intuition rather than hard and fast rules which toddlers seek to exploit with loopholes.
My children definitely responded to vibes. The two boys responded very well to the strong, confident, silent type that a few men in their life exemplified, and were total chaos for anyone else. My daughter needed flowery love and affection to get anything done and would be devastated if I treated her like her brothers.
Dealing with them individually was fine, but when together I basically had to decide who was going to be happy and who would be upset.
That’s a good point, and I wonder if it argues for - what some of us “of an age” reading this might be thinking, having never experienced anything of this kind as children - a sort of consistency that pleases no one.
I can't read your whole comment since substack is a pile of shit and just cuts off after "jungle identification", but everything up to that sounds extremely familiar.
Of course, I have Aspergers, while my wife is highly sensitive, so that explains some of it.
I remember all of these things! One trick that ‘worked’ for us (relatively speaking) was setting a “last food alarm” to go off 30 minutes before actual bedtime. It didn’t work if we just said “are you hungry? If so, eat something now so you don’t panic at bedtime” because we’re just parent chumps. But if The Phone goes off, that’s official and not to be argued with. So the mad dash for further cereal, bagels, and fruit would happen in enough time for us to then at least not have that particular delay tactic available at actual bedtime
Yes, alarms are great. Timed illumination changes ("bedtime lighting", "green light is GO, means get into shoes and jacket, we're going out") complement them nicely.
Yeah that’s a great question. All the therapy talk of recent years has warped people in to believing that you are obligated to give in to your kids demands.
Saying "Alexa, change the song" a few times = happy children dancing and humming and letting me do my thing otherwise.
Refusing = children screaming until I can distract them with something else.
I'm sure in your imagination, if I just stand firm a few times they'll learn that having consistent preferences is important and they shouldn't scream about this, but I think that skill might take until they're three.
Insisting that my boys say "please" helped me with the constant irrational requests at that age. It forced them to surrender the sense of power that they got from making everyone around them jump and imposed a small transaction cost in the form of humility. It was also good for my own sense of self-respect and need to reclaim some degree of control over my life.
My older son went through a phase right around his second birthday when he flatly refused to say "please" and would rather scream non-stop for two hours than say "cookie please" and get a cookie. We eventually compromised and allowed him to save face by saying "you're welcome" instead of "please."
Ok but have you gotten to the phase where they repeatedly ask you what the moon is doing up during the daytime and you have to repeatedly explain to them that they authors of an alarming number of children's books are either very confused about the moon or just lazy but they don't really buy it and just keep asking?
My own Lyra would often not tolerate books being read at all and her brother often looked at them upside down. They both became enthusiastic readers despite our general lack of success at reading aloud together, and the notes they leave each other in the books they're reading on their e-readers are pretty hilarious. Plus when he taught himself to read he could read as fluently upsidedown as right side up for a while so that was cool.
I have twins. Raising kids in bulk required special techniques and I would often strap them both in to their car seats and drive them to sleep at night. Which seems easy enough, but if I stopped they would know it and it was an Emergency. They would both say "oh no. We are stuck! We are stuck!" They are 11 now and I repeat their phrase back to them on the occasions where appropriate. My daughter never fails to hate it.
I deeply sympathize with the awkwardness of the twins' method of requesting "Dayenu." My daughter's word to request "The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly" was also "Die," and for several months she had a habit of enlivening our church's worship services by suddenly demanding it at the top of her lungs.
Yeah, kids mispronouncing things at the top of their lungs suddenly is an issue. Kai sometimes gets VERY excited about trucks, and intermittently pronounces "truck" as either "fuck" or "cuck".
I can never tell from Scott's descriptions whether all the screaming and shrieking is relative to a quiet Saturday afternoon reading, or other toddlers, or only described that way due to misophonia.
You must not have had a toddler. It’s real. They are tiny and naive, but extremely powerful presences. They have more control than the parents over how life feels moment to moment.
I suspect the cops were called by a neighbor walking by who heard lots of screaming. When I lived in Cambridge MA, this would happen to us and our friends all the time (friends from church community with lots of kids). I think these well-meaning passerby typically had limited experience with toddlers
“Don't worry if you choose the wrong one they'll let you know by screaming” this is both 🤣🤣🤣 and like one thing that is actually delightful about very young kids vs adults. The needs are more finite (usually enemurable) and the expressions of whether they are being met are very clear (also enumerable, often overly audible) so you pretty much know where you stand. The permutations on this for an adult are so vast often they themselves have no clue.
The feet in the snack photo. The little pink feet.
The feet!
Also, here’s a trick that sometimes derails an oncoming screamo mode: Lean towards them, look like you have something very important and secret to say, and whisper. You do have to have something to say that will capture their attention, but their attention is pretty easy to capture unless they’re in screamo mode! For screamos over the wrong music, it can be the right music. Or you can say it’s a surprise, and they have to come see it. Possible good surprise: get a little cheap projector that throws images from your phone on the wall. Have a bunch, and don’t show them all — only one, on each occasion. Kai would probably like that big moon picture projected. Or pictures of the kids, or of you. (And I recommend asking Lyra to name or show you some pictures she likes a lot. That will help compensate for Kai’s tendency to take over the personal preference space.) In some situations you can try making the picture brighter or dimmer contingent on how cooperative they’re being.
I make fun of David Friedman for his oft-repeated statement that children are “just small people who don’t know very much”. I have a series of blog posts in which I demonstrate the incorrectness of his statement by relaying stories about my kids. This post does the job very nicely indeed.
I have the unfortunate suspicion that no one in your house called the police. Perhaps someone called pretending to be inside the house to hassle you or made some kind of complaint that you were on drugs or abusing children and the police lied out of concern for retaliation against that individual if you knew the real reason.
Or it's quite possible they just got the wrong house.
I honestly think boy friendly education isn't that hard. It's just competition based and rewards doing hard things not concentiousness, e.g., it's the hard problem put up at the start of the semester in math class that solving gives an immediate A for the term, it's letting you do a really hard EC on the exam to erase all your missed homework and it's posting the top grades in a class on an exam (no need to humiliate the bottom) so boys can compete against each other.
Will it make the medians equal, of course not. But that's not so important, not everyone needs to be great at everything, but it will let those who are really good at something excel without general conscientiousness and with more competitive rewards.
Unfortunately, all incentives for instructors are for reducing failures and very little reward for helping anyone do better than whatever is deemed an A (even though that is almost all that matters as far as society is concerned after elementary school).
Yeah, OK, but must you call it "boy friendly?" I'm female, and was quite competitive intellectually all the way through school. In the early grades I was like Hermione, hand always up bouncing in my seat with from wild eagerness to give the right answer. Kind of obnoxious, I know! Fortunately I outgrew that. When long division got easy and we didn't move on to something else, I worked on getting faster by doing timed competitions again my own record. When the teacher told us there is no way to trisect an angle, I spent several hours over the next week trying to do it. Near the end of high school I was still at it, asking people their SAT scores, trying to sound casual, but actually trying to find out if anyone did better than me.
I was not, though, boisterous the way boys are, though I was no saint -- just broke the rules by passing notes rather than by being disruptive in other ways. And I wasn't all that rare, either. There were a couple other girls in my year in school who were like me, in fact one was amongfmy chief rivals. All 3 of us turned out straight, too, if that matters. And of course once I got to college and grad school I met lots of smart women who wanted to fucking *win*. My best friend in college now holds a chaired professorship at a top law school and I see her quoted in the New York times fairly often. Oh yeah, and my daughter is ranked at the state level in rock climbing. I do agree that there are more males than females with this temperament, but ambitious, competitive women are hardly as rare as hen's teeth. For women in academia or in fields with arduous training I'd say a good 10% have that temperament.
I was speaking about statistical generalities because that's the context to which I was responding to (obviously there is huge overlap in the distributions so there will be many girls who prefer the more competitive style and vice-versa) but you raise an important point -- it really shouldn't be about whether it's boys or girls but giving people who respond best to different learning styles that option. And yes, obviously if we do offer the option it shouldn't be labeled in a gendered fashion.
The difficulty is figuring out who does respond to which. There is a genuine tension here that while some people are motivated by competition others are scared away.
Closest I came to having a SWAT team break down my door….was also because my toddler threw a temper-tantrum loud enough that the developmentally disabled teen next door (he was a sweetheart and was just trying to help) called the cops on me. 🤣
Reccomendation for Nick Cope's songs for small people, he has a series on the bbc with animations but you can find his songs on Spotify and what not. Ralph is a rusty robot was a personal favourite...quite the catalogue.
I believe you’re missing the fact that you’ve spent the majority of their lives naming things for them. You should check out David Lancy’s Chattle, Cherubs, and Changlings.
I request she walk to the changing table, and she cooperatively waddles over in exchange for getting to play with my smartwatch as she gets changed. Hot commodity with the kids: it has a moon on it, they repeatedly inform me.
She also grabs a random new small object to put in her room almost every other night, usually a duplo. Kai by contrast insists on complete and pristine room minimalism before he'll sleep, with the lone exception of his stuffed dog. He will point and scream and adamantly refuse to fall asleep, until any and every room invader is put out. But Lyra clearly got my cluttery maximalist gene.
(One of the only ways in which she is overtly trying to sabotage Kai back, is that during the day she will deliberately place small objects in Kai's crib. I think she just cannot understand why he would possibly want an almost completely toy-less room. To be fair, I feel about the same way around Scott's room sometimes.)
I offer her 3 books, and she ritualistically insists on adding a 4th after, all of which I read to her. I refuse to read her a 5th. Her current favorite is "Lil Pookie," about an adorably-nicknamed anthropomorphic piglet whom she correctly identifies as sharing in her enjoyment of macaroni and books. Her second favorite is Jamberry, a book centered on berries that also has a train in it (Kai: Train is Best Page).
She then insists on brushing her teeth by herself. I've gotten some mileage out of pretending teeth are a train track, and convincing her she *wants* to make the "chugga chugga" noise from when the brush encounters her teeth. When I say it's time for lights-out, she climbs up on the couch and turns off her own light.
Then she snuggles up to 3-5 different stuffed animals in bed, hugs at least one (and possibly all) of them, and waits for me to put something like 5 different blankets on top of her.
She occasionally has tummy troubles or otherwise needs an extra walk around the block, but she typically goes right to bed and sleeps like an angel until morning. When she wakes up, she quietly plays in her own room by herself for about an hour (also angelically), before finally knocking on her door and making noises to be let out, to face ~~Kai our boisterous morning boy~~ the day.
She's lower energy and less impulsive, when contrasted to Kai. Overall effect is that she acts a bit more like a dispositionally-helpful miniature adult with strong mood-swings. If she's in a good mood, I can sometimes task her to fetch things for me.
That sounds very sweet. I think I had a maximal possessiveness gene. My things. My precious sleeve of Lifesavers, etc. This surfaced, embarrassingly, in adulthood. A niece had developed and been indulged in the habit (which I really think was not a good one) of needing to “take one thing away” to her own house when leaving my mother’s house. Thus one time we had out my old Fisher Price barn and animal set, and I noticed the cow was absent. “Oh, I think ****** took it home one day.” (To disappear into her mess! She has so many toys and I just have this set, which is worthless without the cow waah!)
Something like a panic attack was happening within me though I tried to act normal, being as I was about 38.
Relatable? I don't enjoy cleaning, but I compulsively do it now, because I HATE if Scott throws my stuff out when he tries to clean! He doesn't cook, and he has no idea which things I actually use.
I need things to be either where I put them, or visibly out. But the later drives him nuts.
At one point the neutral cooking oil disappeared on me, and when I asked him he went 'We have olive oil, did you really need a second oil?"
(I ended up snapping at him about it, not my proudest moment. It was 3pm on a particularly tough day with the twins.)
Honestly for many years when we were younger, if someone came into our house and my husband asked them if they wanted a drink, there would follow an embarrassing moment when he would open more than one cabinet to find the drinking glasses. This was partly a reflection of his life having nothing whatever to do with cooking but more because the kitchen was so much my unchallenged domain.
If Scott cleans acceptably, so that you don’t have to come behind him - and wrings out the rag or sponge at the end! - that’s a win I suppose. But he definitely must not cook a great deal if he didn’t know about the roles of various cooking oils!
I think it’s kind of cool to have a non-cooking husband by the way. I feel we are unicorns. And their minds are on other things than food.
I wonder too if your boy is reacting to his sister or to you all, with his minimalism - sort of, you guys don’t seem to understand what’s important at any given moment! Things are not all the same!
These are not "mildly scummy" musicians, just working musicians adapting to the changes. The Song-Poem Society is an example of mildly scummy musicians:
my 13 month old boy is much more chill than that. He likes to "DJ" the books but he finishes the book half the time. There is very little screaming when we refuse something he wants, because he knows that won't change our minds and he is quick to move on to some other idea rather than sulking. He cries for 2-10 minutes when he goes down for a noon nap, but at bedtime he almost always just goes straight to sleep with no fuss. (our baby bedtime routine which I originally thought was overkill: Bath in 99F water measured by an infrared thermometer. Wrap in cute baby towel (he usually cries during that part). Carry him to the nursery. Put on his diaper and hanna onesie (he usually cries during this part). Feed him a formula bottle (formerly 6oz, now 4oz as my wife is eager to get him completely off of formula ASAP and I'm lackadaisical about it). Then we put him in the crib with his Tommy Tippee stay put ultra light pacifier, and his Jellycat snuggle puppy, and his sleep sack. Then he goes right to sleep with minimal crying. In general he very rarely cries without a really good reason (tired, hungry, fell down, diaper changes, or we prevented him from stealing dog food within the last 5 seconds). I am pleasantly surprised that he follows some rules at 13 months: He reached to unplug the aura frame and I said no, so he gave up and went to the other outlet to unplug mom's laptop and I said no, so he took his hand away from the outlet and got a proper toy.
Scott, it's very likely that you have already answered this question elsewhere and in-depth, but I am too irregular a reader to know where to find it - do you have a list of recommended reading / listening / absorbing-by-osmosis material for potential parents-to-be? My partner and I are now talking about having kids, and thus I am now scrambling to add to my meager knowledge of this great endeavor.
Emily Oster, "Expecting Better". At least one book that reassures you about when it's fine to let your kids cry it out to get to sleep (I know I'm sort of contradicting myself, but this has already worked a few times, Kai's bedtime troubles just keep creeping back in different forms)
I wonder if twins’ speech clarity is a little hindered because they are listening as much to their opposite number as to a parent.
But it also seems possible if recorded music were not the default/ if Alexa didn’t exist, and you had only sung the song to him, he would have to fall back on singing it himself, which would be practice in … saying “Rockin’ Robin” for Alexa.
But much less funny. I like all the iterations.
I dunno. Probably children’s minds just run past their vocal apparatus. (Especially in a fast-paced, quickly changing environment such as your household!)
My child had a very short period of indistinct speech, though it was so cute (to us) while it lasted. But our lives were comparatively dull. He didn’t yet know the names of everything though. He was about your children’s age when he came in and said to me, worriedly, “Mommy, I turned something on”.
Can you tell us what it was?
“I cannot” he said simply, but distinctly. (It was the window AC.)
"Listen" is a wonderful book that will make your life easier.
Stay listening, Play listening, and setting limits, three listening tools described in the book, combine to diffuse most of the difficulties described above.
A lot of the book goes something like child has meltdown over x, I did the stay listening technique, and then child was perfectly fine after that forever. Which sounds kind of ridiculous but is fairly true in my experience.
My story the first time I tried it: The child I watch wanted to get picked up. We were in a situation where I wanted him to walk. I set the limit and told him that it was time for him to walk. He clamored to get picked up. I got down to his level, which increased the clamor at first because it's also the first move in getting picked up, and told him that I couldn't pick him up right now and that he had to walk. I continued to do the stay listening technique as well as I could, thinking there was going to be several minutes of this. But instead, after 20 seconds, he abruptly stopped, took my hand and started walking.
When my oldest was around your kids' age she had similar bedtime delaying tactics. I eventually realized it was mostly that she didn't like sleeping in a room without one of her parents. Once we went back to sleeping in the same room it got a lot easier.
Our local children’s musician was a guy named Joe McDermott. We were ourselves too young (and selfish) as parents to do such things as submit to “Beatles for Babies” or whatnot, and we never purchased any made-for-kids’ music (for some reason, Big Band and bluegrass and Arthur Fiedler Boston Pops were our chief choices for little one) but we did inevitably see Joe McDermott live occasionally. It always made my husband sad/annoyed to hear mention of him. The guy had been in what he considered a pretty good college town indie group back in the day, before leaving “legit” music behind and pivoting to children’s performance.
It kind of fed into his feeling that our town, though celebrated for live music, had a weird way of sabotaging musical careers.
(Of course, a music snob makes such summary judgments as “hack” with much less thought then went into my typing the above, but it really was a backhanded tribute in this case.)
Now it seems like he made a brilliant decision, was ahead of the curve; but at the time having known of him “before” in his performances he always seemed to me a touch melancholy and subdued, which was not unappealing probably to the young mothers.
Oh man, I know how you feel. A year ago when my twins were three, I was just starting to feel like the permanent emergency was finally over. Then they both got some respiratory infection, we found out they had asthma and they were both hospitalized for a week.
After three unsuccessful visits to urgent cares for near constant coughing we finally got into the pediatrician in time for him to tell us their oxygen was dangerously low and call the wee-woo bus.
Somehow I was not expecting that.
They’re fine now. Thank god for Budesinide .
For us the “sun song” is “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas”.
> I can’t remember who said this, but I can’t unsee it - toddlers, much more than adults, are still running off evolved instincts that expect the ancestral environment and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
I believe - you - did, in your book review of The Secret Of Our Success? That’s what immediately came to mind to me at least.
The irony of talking about your toddlers like hunter gatherers while ignoring the fact that the defiant one is the boy and not the girl, while refusing to acknowledge that maybe a boy hunter gatherer ought to be raised differently compared to a girl hunter gatherer
My only recommendation is to consider real music. My two years old is a big Fleetwood Mac fan. Personally, I rather listen to that than to kid's music.
I tried that. The only real song my children like as much as their vapid nursery rhymes is Queen's "Bicycle Race". I think it's because it includes a word they know ("Bicycle") said very loudly, clearly, and repeatedly.
I think I was lucky because I never exposed my kids to the "toddler crack" songs. I don't think that there is anything wrong with them necessarily, but I don't want to hear them.
For repetitive songs they might like:
- Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac. Started being called "The Fairy Song" because of the intro. My kids (2 and 4) like singing "ooooooooaaaaaaaaaah, I wanna be with you everywhere" over and over.
- Jolene by Dolly Parton
- Wake Me Up Before you Go-Go by Wham!
- Purple Rain by Prince. They find the concept of purple rain amusing.
I once saw a comment on a YouTube video about Cry It Out that said Cry It Out was wrong because, "Did God leave us to cry it out?" and I thought this was a uniquely bad take.
Brother, you need to assert yourself with your kids. They will try, but you must make clear to them that you make the rules, they don't. You enforce the rules.
If it's bedtime, it's bedtime. They will survive going to bed hungry - they might even learn a lesson. But if you notice they've eaten at least a few bites, then know that they are manipulating you. That's developmentally appropriate for them to do, but it's developmentally inappropriate for you to kowtow to.
You are the f*cking parent. Act like it.
Same with brushing teeth and everything else.
The big rocks must be achieved, roughly at the same time every day, no matter what. And they must not be delayed much.
You are the f*cking parent. Act like it.
Kids who grow up experiencing adults who kowtow, who knows that any rule is flexible if they don't want to follow it, become the sort of unpleasant, unworkable, unskilled dullards we have too many of today.
You are the f*cking parent. Act like it.
Discipline and routine today forms a strong adult in the future. Weak parenting today forms a weak adult in the future.
You love them too much to be a coward when you are raising them. You are the f*cking parent. Act like it.
I appreciate this perspective, but I think as phrased it's too harsh.
I'm not convinced that my son really has enough common sense to eat before bed if he wants to. He's amply demonstrated bad judgment in many other ways, and he only just turned two.
So I start his bedtime routine five minutes early and give him five minutes to snack. I think this works better than having to listen to him sob all night because he's hungry, or breaking the bright-line rule that once he's in his crib he can't come out to eat.
When he's old enough that we can talk about these things together and I can be sure he understands them, my standards will be stricter.
A generational thing? Most older readers will probably be puzzled by the concept of “bedtime food”, food and bedtime having no connection that I’ve ever heard of until now.
But I think what/how children eat is maybe so different now. More like a series of snacks all day - healthy snacks I imagine. Whole foods.
Not so much meals nor so many carbs as used to fill our little bellies.
I’ve observed a friend’s grandchildren eating in this way. They have their ten things to eat whether yogurt or produce or something from a bag and are offered them as asked.
This is how I make sense of bedtime food, which otherwise seems like an option that might be skipped.
TL;DR: the desire for food not to be a “battleground” necessarily entailed the elimination of the idea of scheduled mealtimes.
Longtime reader, first time I’ve been moved to comment.
I’m a mom of two kids, 11 and 8. They each had a phase like this too but I didn’t let them run my household as tiny adorable irrational tyrants. I held my ground to let them know there is a hierarchy they need to respect. I’m not saying I did it perfectly! But they obey me without whining or arguing most of the time. If they disagree with a course of action they explain why, and I listen and sometimes adjust. I explain the limits I set when possible. They generally respect me and each other. I think this is the outcome you want? I got here by telling them no some of the time and sticking to it!
If this was written with some irony as a montage, or greatest hits, of giving into a tyrannical toddler - a failure reel - it is relatable and funny. But if this is what every day is actually like, you gotta set some limits.
Third theory - it’s rage-bait? Fourth - a cry for help? Intentions very unclear to me but well-written and entertaining as always.
Maybe I’m just thick as mud, but I don’t get the joke here “I now think we’ll discover their long-sought ‘boy-friendly teaching methods’ around the same time we finally eliminate the ‘bro culture’ that prevents women from winning exactly 50% of physics Nobels.)” Like are you saying boys sabotage their own education? Is it just a joke saying “boy friendly teaching methods” are fake?
Saw all the hate on Twitter about this. Those people are ridiculous. You obviously do not need other people's affirmations, but for what it's worth I think the approach here is a good one.
In my experience, what you do as a parent has almost no impact on how kids behave. I know parents who were very hands-off progressive with well-behaved children and others who are monsters. Likewise, I know parents who were super-strict and some of their children turned into upstanding citizens and others are criminals.
A thing that amazed me with my own children is how early their personality is evident.
All of the parenting advice I have seen is mostly nonsense. For anyone with kids: do your best, put in a sincere effort; beyond that no particular strategy matters.
I'm not sure "daddy-blogging" is going to increase substack subscriptions, but this was cute.
I'm mostly a lurker, but, as someone in a very similar situation (first kid as a 40 year old parent, etc), I wanted to say I find your kids and your family adorable, and my wife laughed when I read her the bit about the secret "how to toddler" book.
I'm sharing this because I saw a bunch of random cruelty/condescension on social media for something I thought was exceptionally wholesome, and I figured most people who found your post endearing probably didn't reach out and tell you directly.
Enjoy your family. Kids are such an incredible joy.
"I now think we’ll discover their long-sought ‘boy-friendly teaching methods’ around the same time we finally eliminate the ‘bro culture’ that prevents women from winning exactly 50% of physics Nobels."
I wouldn't be so dismissive about this claim. The average age of physics Nobel laureates over the past five years was 77. People are getting Nobels now for research conducted in the 1970s, back when many Ivy League schools didn't admit women. The "natural rate" of women winning physics Nobels might not be exactly 50%, but of course discrimination is a huge factor. The pool of potential Nobel laureates still includes many women whose careers were impacted by blatant de jure discrimination from decades ago.
I recommend the book goodnight gorilla. It has the moon on almost every page and finding it can be a game. If you take this recommendation, I would also like to know from a bonafide moon expert which page has the best moon.
I was at a library in japan and saw a giant board book section. Like 3ft by 2ft books. One of the books was papa please get the moon for me. Familiar with the title and pop up mechanism I excitedly called my kids over to go through it. It did not disappoint.
I had this happen to me. My five year old threw a temper tantrum because I went to the store without taking her. She had the windows open and was shouting out the window. And my next door neighbors called the cops, those assholes.
I think I know the exact Jonah song. I have a lot of reliably obnoxious songs I learned at Vacation Bible School I can break out if I need an obnoxious song for some reason.
I think toddlers must be programmed to learn from adults what to eat and what not to eat. But maybe in a way that's a bad match for pills, eg "put everything in your mouth and see what happens" or "copy what adults do"
With our kid, "I'm hungry!" at 7:57 every damn night has mostly resolved. Not through any successful strategy on our part, just by him turning 7. I know this sucks to hear right now, 7 - 2 is a horrifyingly large number.
(We also came to the conclusion that our kid will not in fact cry it out. He will cry until he's shaking in terror at having been abandoned. Cry it out was the absolute worst advice for our kid, still regret trying it. But it worked like a charm for our friend's kid -- they barely had to do anything. So we just snuggle in bed every night until he's well asleep, and now we think "get the snugs while they last, some day he'll be a teenager and he won't want this.")
Children in dangerous environments (like, say, the Savannah before we had weapons) learn to be quiet, very very early.
So I don't think toddlers' shouting is evolutionarily motivated.
I am curious as to how many modes toddlers have. Is it just two? Screams at everything, or quiet like a mouse? Or are there intermediaries that are natural equilibria? (Aka: do all toddlers in Japan/France scream at everything?)
> We both got the same types of cases. We were both practicing the same kinds of therapy. We were both in the same training program, studying under the same teachers. But our experiences were totally different. In particular, all her patients had dramatic emotional meltdowns, and all my patients gave calm and considered analyses of their problems, as if they were lecturing on a particularly boring episode from 19th-century Norwegian history.
> I’m not bragging here. I wish I could get my patients to have dramatic emotional meltdowns. As per the textbooks, there should be a climactic moment where the patient identifies me with their father, then screams at me that I ruined their childhood, then breaks down crying and realizes that she loved her father all along, then ???, and then their depression is cured. I never got that. I tried, I even dropped some hints, like “Maybe this reminds you of your father?” or “Maybe you feel like screaming at me right now?”, but they never took the bait. So I figured the textbooks were misleading, or that this was some kind of super-advanced technique, or that this was among the approximately 100% of things that Freud just pulled out of his ass.
Have you considered that Kai is in cahoots with your professional peers frustrated with your easy way with patients?
I lived under a different curse. I followed the parenting strategy of always providing an explanation for the rules I wanted my children to live under. Whenever I had to deny them something, I would give them a reason, worded at a level they could understand. Unfortunately, this taught them to become rules lawyers--whenever they were denied something, they learned that, if they could challenge my rule, or offer an exception that was worded within my explanation, they often could get what they wanted. Now imagine them as teenagers.
God help me, I can't blame anyone else, I did it to myself.
I hope that when the kids asked for "the fish song" Alexa played them "Fish" by Mr Scruff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kybyy1EkoOE
It includes quotes from the King of England's children book!
Wait, really? Is that "The Old Man of Lochnagar" or another one?
(I confess that I am not as familiar with His Majesty's oeuvre as a British subject should be, though I did once drink whisky with his gamekeeper)
Aye, its Old man of Lochnager
I hope Alexa doesn't decide on "How much is the fish?" from the 90s. It's a great song though.
Heads up - your 'Learn Phrygian In Zero Days' link goes to this article on Neom that I'm guessing you were sharing with someone immediately before writing this post
https://ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-line/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Thanks, fixed. I guess in terms of accidentally sending my browsing history to 100,000 people, that's one of the less embarrassing ways that could go.
A good article by the way, definitely deserves a spot in a lynx post, even though this outcome was never in doubt.
> Unfortunately, Kai has been reading the How To Be A Toddler books
Did the author of that series use a clever strategy like putting an increasing number of moons on each page?
On that note, a textbook/encyclopedia on Solar System would maybe be appreciated and even result in some learning. And I don't mean something made specifically for 2- or 3-year-olds.
I highly recommend finding some Music Together classes nearby. They are well done re: music education, the songs are much higher quality than whatever slop the algorithm is recommending, and you won’t be supporting Bezos
I second the Music Together recommendation! The songs are so catchy that we often sing them to our toddler, and they’ve come in handy during times like long car rides and diaper changes that otherwise could lead to screaming.
Our two year old got a "Yoto box" music player for Christmas. It's really captured his attention - he'll sit and listen to audiobooks, rapt. But now we can't go to bed without it. He needs his bedtime audio story (after his bedtime real book story). Last night, its battery died before he went to sleep, and he was furious. I swapped it out for his brother's while he wasn't looking and charged it, but forgot to put his back in place before he woke up. Big mistake! No 911 call, though.
Seconded on the Yoto! My 3 year old absolutely loves it, you have firm control over what music they have access to, and it's very robust. Strongly recommended.
Third on the Yoto. He mainly uses it for stories and car rides but he loves having control of it himself, and being able to switch cards to choose what he wants. And since I control which cards he has, it's a lot more parent-friendly than Alexa.
I've been building a playlist of stories for him from downloaded Cozyland and Ahway Island stories and he loves it.
My sample-size-of-one finding is that trains continue to be an emergency at least until age 8. My daughter is more civilized about them than she was as a toddler, but on a recent road trip she got extremely excited every time we passed a freight train. I was usually the one pointing them out to her, as I was watching the road while she read or drew or played games, but she would always enthusiastically drop whatever she was doing and look when I called her attention to a train.
Airplanes (especially ones with visible contrails) are also interesting, but not quite at the level of trains.
Ah, I see you've raised fellow train-enthusiastic urbanists. I didn't expect the Bay Area (that's where Scott lives, right?) to be amenable to this.
There's the Caltrain line that goes from Gilroy to SF, the BART lines in the East Bay and the Penninsula, the Amtrak line that goes through San Jose and the East Bay in its way to Sacramento and Northern California, and a bunch of freight trains that go on mostly the same tracks as the passenger trains. I think Scott in somewhere around Oakland or Berkeley, so BART, Amtrak, and several freight lines are likely to be salient.
Also, I seem to be suffering from a Mandela Effect thingy where I have very distinct memories of the Amtrak "Coast Starlight" train making a stop in Gilroy when I rode it in the early 2000s, but it definitely doesn't now and everything I can find online seems to indicate that the Coast Starlight always went straight from Salinas to Diridon Station in San Jose. Either my brain is mixing up Amtrak stop announcements with Caltrain (I definitely took Caltrain south to Diridon to get on Amtrak more than once, and at the time half the Caltrain runs continued on to Gilroy instead of ending in San Jose), or Amtrak is giving the Gilroy train station the Stalin treatment.
Also some light rail in the south bay.
There's Caltrain, and then San Francisco itself has trolleys and cable cars. Places like the zoo have those little trains that tootle around the area. The West has trains!
"Ah, I see you've raised fellow train-enthusiastic urbanists. I didn't expect the Bay Area (that's where Scott lives, right?) to be amenable to this."
A friend of mine has a now-5-year-old boy.
Silicon Valley has CalTrain and light rail and for a while a common weekend activity was just riding them. Get ticket, get on, get off in 15 or 20 minutes, get on one going back to where we started then get off where we started.
There is also Amtrack, though not where we can see it on a normal day, and probably some freight traffic.
But once the kid realizes that the trains can be ridden much like an amusement park ride ...
Kai likes the BART. I feel kind of bad for him, because I grew up in the suburbs with great access to big freight trains, and I think Kai thinks the BART is all there is, and all those cool trains in his book are as mythical as dragons and unicorns. One day I want to take him to the big railroad in downtown Oakland, but I've been told that there's no way to predict freight train schedules ahead of time, and I don't want to sit there for hours with no guarantee of seeing anything.
There's plenty of freight traffic on the west coast, what with the ports there. The Union Pacific line runs through Oakland, though you may have a better time at Sacramento or Stockton.
Another option would be Virtual Railfan. They have webcams all around the world, several of which are available free on YouTube (their website offers more for paid subscribers). That was our go-to after moving to the west Phoenix valley, far from the major line in Flagstaff.
Growing up in Oceanside, I'd go out with my father every Thursday night to chase the Escondido Local, a very slow freight train. When they started the Sprinter light rail project, they upgraded the line for higher speed, which made it harder to keep up. We'd also take trips to Cajon Pass (a very busy four-track main runs through the valley, with a good spot right next to a hotel), but all this is probably way too far for you.
Does he have a route map? I lived in Oslo with a 3 year old train fanatic, where we got around mostly on street cars. He knew exactly which tram to take where with which connection to get home. I never knew how he figured this out, other than from studying the maps at the stops.
I have a picture of him on the TGV around that time, grinning madly.
Point Pinole would be a good trip. The parking lot is across the railroad tracks from the park, so you get great freight (and passenger) train access in a remarkably rural environment, plus all the nice things about the park and shoreline.
I wonder at what age he'd appreciate the rail museum in Sacramento? They've got some magnificent engines in there, but nothing is moving so maybe it wouldn't register. Then again many of them are steam trains, which is what children's books are depicting.
Good thought - their grandma took them to this, and they had fun!
On the topic of Sacramento, they may be old enough to appreciate the Cali State Fair. I'm a Sac native, and have very fond memories of the Fair. Highly recommended.
It is really an excellent museum. Worth the trip.
When I was a kid I loved trains; my dad would take me on walks near the train tracks (there was a place about a mile away from our house where a road with a sidewalk ran parallel to the tracks for a while). We didn't always see a train there, but we did often enough that I was excited to keep going.
If you can make it down to the South Bay to Roaring Camp Railroads, it's a heritage steam railway that my kid really enjoyed riding; it goes up a very steep hill through a redwood forest and back down.
When my son was a toddler, he wanted to go to the 14th Street subway station in New York just to watch the trains come and go.
When it was appropriate, he would yell, “Express!“
You could hang out at Jack London square until you hear one coming?
My kids just recently got old enough for me to take them on the VTA, pretty much the worst train system in the entire Bay Area.
They were so over the moon about it that we did not go to our destination, but rather stayed on the line all the way to the end and wrote it all the way back, all the while exclaiming, unprompted, “I'm so glad to be on the train!”.
My kids used to be very interested in the concept of trains, but very quickly got bored of actually riding on them.
No, this is not our stop, we just got on three minutes ago, it's eighteen more minutes
My first week in the Bay Area, I was at the Caltrain station at 9pm and was glad there was a dad with two little boys standing nearby, talking about trains. The train came. I got on, glad that this trio was going to be with me instead of alone. But no! The dad said "alright, we saw the trains, now let's go home and sleep". They had driven all the way to the caltrain station just to see the train!
The idea that children are evolved to shout about animals they see until acknowledged by an adult is... incredibly convincing.
My toddler genuinely surprises me with her level of observation. She’ll point and shout at an airplane I’ve barely heard. Notice a toy tucked behind a chair, barely visible, all the way across the open concept living room.
Some combination of more acute sight and hearing and a less developed filter for shutting out extraneous sights and sounds?
I think it's just that they are constantly surrounded by things they don't understand, so they get very excited when they see something that they do. I don't know what all this other chaos is, but that right there is a horsey.
I think it’s the lowered filtering more than anything. Because I’ve seen similar behavior in people with developmental disabilities - like the time we did a family road trip through Colorado/Wyoming/Nebraska/South Daktoa and my disabled aunt lit up and pointed out every. single. cow. she. saw. for days on end. “Oh look, a cow!! … Oh, wow, look guys! A cow!”
Whereas I saw the first cow, thought “oh, dairy land I guess” and immediately stopped paying attention to every other cow.
Meanwhile my daughter is incredibly bad at looking for things she wants. I attribute it also to a lack of filtering. Also, an extremely low frustration tolerance.
I'm not a parent but my first thought - is the primary thing of interest in these interactions the object, or a known/trusted adult's reaction to the object?
Over a long enough time span a child shouting when he sees various things might pick up a lot of info from the reaction of adults - maybe not apparent at the time but over time I bet it reinforces.
"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" seems like a cultural encoding of this idea - learning to properly report risks as a basic value. A child who shouts "lion" and gets a big reaction learns a lot about how to respond to lions as opposed to "antelope".
Lovely children! Maybe they would like listening to Forrest Frank?
God bless!
Two moon-prominent posts in a row. Maybe you and Kai aren't so different
Kai got obsessed with the sun the same time I did ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more ), but I never mentioned it to him, and I don't think I even talked about it when he was around, so it has to be a coincidence.
As above, so below.
He must have mentioned it to you.
Ex*cuse* you. This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
What's his position re the Fatima sun miracle?
When I saw the email for this post I thought maybe you were weighing in on one or more of the ongoing crises. This is much better, at least for my happiness.
Same! Enjoyed the reminder of the joys and frustrations (and joyful frustrations) of parenting toddlers.
I feel seen.
Every two year old will giggle at the line from Leonard Cohen “the moon swims nakedly”. And adults will smile. The definition of poetry is - familiar words put together differently. Every good heart loves that.
God I miss those days.
I mean it is much easier and better after age 5 or so (maybe a little later for boys), but still. I miss it.
Yep, exactly.
Wrong link: Learn Phrygian links to https://ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-line/
Scott, your children are beautiful, and your writing is wonderful. I was both charmed and greatly amused. Thank you!
P. S. Around 1985, Dave Barry wrote a fine column about his then-5-year-old son Robert approaching older German tourists on the beach, and insisting that Dad inform the Germans that he, Robert, was a particular type of dinosaur.
The story had a similar tone to this post.
This seems to be the Dave Barry story
https://web.archive.org/web/20060524085916/https://wolaver.org/Humor/davebarry.htm
That's it, though edited a bit for the collection. It was the first Dave Barry column I ever read, and I'm almost certain it appeared in our local broadsheet in late 1985.
There's an old Scott comment about how if you want to write nonfiction well, use microhumor (among others), and he explicitly named Dave Barry as a master of this.
About the time I reached the "demented leprechaun" part of this post, I started thinking that Scott had somehow merged with Dave Barry. That is a high compliment in my book.
Also: "I tried to explain that this wasn’t Jonah the babysitter, but I don't know if it sunk in." Heh.
Being a fan of Matt Farley who has seen him live, I don't think "mildly scummy" accurately describes him. It's not that he's looking to make a quick buck, but rather that he feels compelled to spend every waking moment creating art, and found a way to turn his compulsion into a living. The fact that he also makes many micro-budget independent films for tiny audiences demonstrates that he's not in it for the money.
There's a great NYT article peering into his soul: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/magazine/spotify-matt-farley.html?unlocked_article_code=1.DFA.nabI._8xf3ASjfcJ9&smid=url-share
Sorry, I should've clarified: Matt Farley is "The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over", as well as "The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee", "The Toilet Bowl Cleaners", and many many other musical aliases.
Thanks for the link: that was a fascinating, hilarious read.
I am really rooting for Kai, he is one of life's rare birds.
With how clever your kids seem to be, I heartily recommend audiobooks for times when you're not able to read to them, many kids can follow audiobooks that are a tier up from what's "age-appropriate" for them to look at and they really like it.
2nd this, my 3 year old son similarly likes to flip to certain pages in a book and fights attempts to read them in any kind of linear order but he loooooves the audiobook of Dr. Seuss's Fox in Sox, so that's often playing in the car when Daniel Tiger is mysteriously unavailable.
https://open.spotify.com/track/0nWLCUJg8dRfqQx6Ktz8Jq?si=349b3e4ff0c142a5
This is hilarious.
You realize, of course, that this post will embarrass your children endlessly ten or twelve years from now.
Their real names aren't Kai and Lyra. I don't know how much this will help (especially since these have become their IRL nicknames). I may lock or even hide these posts later, if they ask me to.
That's good, though I feel like it should maybe be the other way around (the posts stay hidden until and unless they give you permission to publish them).
Yes. No child will be comfortable with strangers knowing that they were inarticulate and unpredictably eccentric at the age of two. That trauma could never be repaired. Ever.
It definitely doesn't describe literally every single child in the history of humanity.
I don't expect it to be traumatising. It just seems more polite to ask first.
If I wanted to publish an article about a friend of mine online and put their picture in it, I should ask them for permission before doing that. If they are currently unable to answer the question, because they're on a very long vacation or something, I think I should default to not publishing until they're back and can give me permission.
My mother has never hesitated to recount the things I did as a baby. She particularly seems to enjoy telling my girlfriends when there is an opportunity. Irrecoverable trauma, though I think it's more or less universal.
My parents have similar stories about me from decades ago, and I love them.
I posted the audiotapes of me being a precocious toddler under a CC0 license back when I was 17 or so.
Jeff Vogel did the Story About the Baby and the Story About the Toddler and basically stopped writing about his kid once she started being a person rather than a collection of not-THAT-unique impulses.
"Respecting Toddler Privacy
I am often asked if I think writing this somehow violates Cordelia’s privacy. The answer is no. I don’t say anything about her that is not true for pretty much every child. All children cry, all children squish bugs, and all children SHOULD squish bugs. There are some things she has done that I feel could be considered private, and I have not written about them, even when they were funny."
I think you're well within that. Also, as long as they don't consciously remember it's not likely to induce teeth-grinding cringing in them, whereas if my parent's publicized some of the shit I remember doing as a child I might have to become a hermit out of self-respect. Nor does anything you've mentioned above seem like something that could be used to mock them socially. Is fine.
My dad made similar blog posts on his kids’ antics up until a certain age (things would usually fade out by 10 when we were more identifiable and less ridiculous.) His father kept small notebooks of quotes of funny things each of *his* sons said (one book per kid.) My own reaction was that this was a normal thing to do growing up and I often found them a source of amusement rather than embarrassing. Maybe because by age 10 or so you’re less identified with a toddler version of yourself and are more grown up?
Embarrassment is a possibility especially if the thing adults are laughing about was something you did say, last week. But otherwise I found the esoteric ramblings (including say numerical models of how many words I’d learned) to be amusing and a sign of attentiveness.
On the (relatively few) occasions where my parents talked about my early childhood antics in social contexts where I was a teen or young adult, I remember being vaguely annoyed not by telling about the antics themselves, but because (mostly my dad specially) seemed to conceptualize this as him participating in an important social ritual of embarassing teenage-me by telling stories of me as a young child doing funny young child things. Most of which I was too young to remember anyway. What I do remember was my dad telling these stories with a shit-eating grin in social situations I didn't necessarily want to be at to begin with, and expecting me to have some kind of reaction to learning that I reacted in some childishly cute and funny way to something when I was three years old.
Yeah, when it's meant to provoke a reaction from the child or is something genuinely embarrassing to the present person, that's not ideal. My parents have occasionally embarrassed me by telling stories of me being adorable where I remember thinking I was being cute and thus it is acutely embarrassing now, but other than that it's mostly either stuff from before I was conscious or things that are genuinely amusing.
For example, they apparently decided to back off on manners when I was asked if it was raining and responded 'no thank you.' This continues to slightly amuse me to this day.
> My first guess was that one of the twins had gotten their hands on a phone and dialed random things, but neither my nor my wife’s call history showed anything incriminating.
You can call make an emergency call from any cell phone without unlocking it. I assume that calls 911, but since the phone is locked, it must not rely on the 'Phone' app, so it makes sense that it wouldn't show up in that app's call history.
Incidentally, you can even make emergency calls from a cell phone that you're not paying any cell service provider for. 911 is special!
The Internet confusingly shows two conflicting claims:
People are puzzled that their 911 calls are not shown up in their phone call logs. Other people comment this is totally normal and by design to protect someone in a domestic abuse situation.
People ask why their 911 calls show up in their call logs, they thought they were suppressed. Other people comment this is totally normal and how could it be anything different!? You make a call, of course it is in the call logs.
I suspect different phone manufacturers, operating system versions, network providers and plain old bugs muddle the water.
For iPhones this is triggering emergency calls even if locked:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/if-youve-ever-accidentally-called-911-on-your-iphone-read-this-now/
> If you've got kids or have a tendency to fidget with your iPhone, it's quite common to call emergency services by mistake. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to prevent the Emergency SOS feature from accidentally activating, while still keeping the feature available in case of an actual emergency.
> - Press and hold the side and volume buttons
- Rapidly press the side button five times
- Slide the Emergency SOS slider
Or maybe it's the difference between calling 911 using an emergency button sequence and calling it by dialing 9-1-1 on the virtual keypad.
What is funny is that we could easily find out by experiment: just make different emergency calls and test what happens!
But of course we won’t.
There really ought to be a "test" emergency number (or mode you can put your phone in) that can be used to verify and practice these things
Interesting! But in Scott's case it doesn't sound like he thinks the twins could have intentionally dialed 911 — his theory was that they were dialing random numbers — so whether or not his phone would suppress 911 from call logs in all cases, I think in this case they must have triggered the "emergency call" feature.
That tip at the end is very nice! I'll have to look into whether my phone has something like that.
I have a two-year-old. Tears of laughter are streaming down my face from how relatable large portions of this post are. (My little guy is intermediate between your two on how much he does a lot of these.)
Our experience was that a tolerance to lulling developed, and we eventually went to Cry It Out. For child 2 we went straight to Cry It Out.
They're both now complete psychopaths. Kidding! They're just teenagers.
"... but I repeat myself."
> The whole time, he screams “MY FOOD! MY FOOOOOOD!” like a demented leprechaun being dragged away from his Lucky Charms.
I had to put my phone down laughing about this
Grandma of a 26-month-old here. It goes without saying that I relish your every post about toddlers!
But one quibble: I don't agree that toddlers are hard-wired to learn animal names and noises. Rather, the baby book/toy/clothing industrial complex imposes this on them. So, so, so many books about animal noises! And the rug in our nursery features jungle animals, including a cheetah and a sloth. (I've had to be very careful not to misidentify cheetahs as leopards, and vice versa.) I think it's a leftover from when nearly everybody worked on a farm, but now it's just weird. My granddaughter never even saw a cow until about two weeks ago, much less a sloth.
We have a control group here - some of our friends, as a joke, got us "The Pythagorean Theorem For Babies" ( https://www.amazon.com/Pythagorean-Theorem-Babies-Baby-University/dp/1728258227 ). I can confirm that my children are less adept at learning the Pythagorean Theorem than at learning animal noises.
Consider color names: they’re equally pushed by the baby-stuff industrial complex, but are not particularly important (to be able to name) from an evolutionary perspective.
My toddler is much more obsessed with them than with animal sounds.
Funny - my kids are so bad at this that actually just this morning my wife and I did did an impromptu pedigree trace to figure out whether it was possible that my son had inherited his great-grandfather's color blindness.
(answer: seems like no, would have to follow a non-standard inheritance pattern)
I think it's evolutionarily selected by what tended to successfully get attention from parents. Ancestral parents probably tended to be more responsive to animal callouts, so children that did this got slightly more food/safety.
It might also be that you have trained them directly, if you are more responsive to certain callouts than others. They'd probably learn very quickly which call is most likely to get you to respond.
We had the same experience, and actually discovered that there *is* a history of red-green colour blindness on both my and my wife's side!
...but no, my oldest was just terrible with colours. It really stood out though versus her facility with animals (and cars/trains/airplanes/boats, which I'm pretty sure like you fit into the same mental slot).
Color blindness is typically X-linked recessive. Is that the inheritance pattern you were testing for?
I've been wondering the same thing with my two year old daughter. She's even adopted an alternative meaning to "red" and "blue" in place of "this" or "that". When she wants something she asks for the "blue" one, regardless of the color. I'll point to my best guess and either I'm lucky and correct, or she says "no the red one". If I'm wrong again it's back to the "blue" one, her displeasure multiplying with each guess.
He might have gotten it via another route?
Aren't color distinctions (and therefore names) cultural anyway? Wine-dark sea and all that.
Animal sounds and taxonomies are cultural too. Ministry of Dag and all that.
There's some cultural aspects to it, but it's not totally arbitrary.
I have a bunch of Chris Farrie’s Science for Babies book, and just give it a year. My 3 year old loves his books. Not as much as Pokemon, so your animal identification idea still holds water, but once he’s in the why phase, those books are golden.
My colleagues gave me "Bayesian Probability for Babies" when my last one was born (https://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Probability-Babies-Chris-Ferrie/dp/1492680796). It is practically the only book to which she is indifferent.
She likes animals and animal noises, but I think cares more about colors, oddly. She has an need to line them up roygbiv, and I have no idea where she even learned that; when building with blocks or dressing herself, no color can touch itself.
Rainbows are everywhere in children's designs. My daughter also lines things up in this order.
Decades ago I remember my cousin and I took our children to the zoo. Hers was a young toddler in a stroller, not very verbal, who had brought along her toddler book of zoo animals.
She seemed a little unhappy with the proceedings.
At each stop, her mother would say, “Look at the - (giraffe, lion, anteater)!” And she would refuse to submit to look but instead furiously try to find a page with the animal and if found, say “Book! Book! Book” in a stubbornly aggrieved way.
I am not especially interested in children but was genuinely curious what was going on in her head.
Maybe it would be best to let children know the few animals in their world - dogs, cats, squirrels, occasional farm animal, potbellied pig or goose on a leash (sigh) - so that they can marvel over the diversity of them later, as I recall (?) the Ingallses did in one of the Little House books, an illustrated book of animals furnishing one of their few windows on the world.
I think you have the causation reversed here. The industrial complex does not cares whatsoever about pushing any sort of agenda other than "buy stuff". They want money, so they make things that sell. Animal books sell, so they make them. It's not necessarily obvious whether they sell because children genuinely want them (more than other books) or because parents think children want them and get confirmation biased when the children care, or because parents get more enthusiastic about sharing them which makes the child care, or some other convoluted chain of causation. But at the end of the day, they sell. They sell a lot, so they make a lot.
It sounds to me like you're in dire need of **moar songs**.
The Duck Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtN1YnoL46Q&list=RDMtN1YnoL46Q&start_radio=1
The Fox Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE&list=RDjofNR_WkoCE&start_radio=1
The Owl Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBpF_Zj4OA&list=RD9hBpF_Zj4OA&start_radio=1
The Color Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gavT_q9CLME&list=RDgavT_q9CLME&start_radio=1
The Wellerwan song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Oc9Xl5Aps&list=RD90Oc9Xl5Aps&start_radio=1
Don’t let them listen to The Happy Song. It makes toddlers VERY unhappy when you eventually have to turn off The Happy Song.
On that note, you will observe that I didn't list any songs about young sharks.
I looked this up and now I get kinda annoyed when I have to turn off the Happy Song. Damn it.
When they're older, there's the unicorn song by the Irish Rovers - the one with the green alligators and long-necked geese.
Empowered toddlers are like unruly young dogs
My niece, at about four, constantly got out of bed and came downstairs. Thirsty. Hungry. Heard a sound. Any excuse. One night my brother-in-law laid down the law. “Do NOT come down again unless it’s an emergency.”
Ten minutes later, she appears.
“Is this an emergency?”
“Yes!”
“What is it?”
“Do you know how to do this?” [makes upside-down finger goggles]
A friend’s toddler used to do something similar after he’d been put to bed. He would grab up various articles of clothing and adorn himself in a “humorous” way and come into their living room as if he were doing an after-dinner act. Like he was going to razzle-dazzle them.
Inside you there are two twins: Lyra, just enjoying it while it lasts; and Kai, more pensive.
wholesome and nourishing
I propose using Suno (or some equivalent music generating AI) to make custom songs for your kids. I don't know how well it handles children's music, but I really like the ability to take things that I care about or inside jokes or events that actually happened to me and my family and turn them into songs about those things. It's especially good if you write your own lyrics rather than having the AI do it, though that takes a bit more effort.
Sure, you can find songs about the moon or a bus, but you're not going to find a song about "Kai driving a bus on the moon while Lyra eats moonberries in the back seat" unless you make it yourself, and I bet they'd appreciate it if you can convince the AI to make the tune good enough.
I love these posts. I'm half-afraid of them becoming parasocial parenting for me.
I feel like vicarious parenting is fine to enjoy, if that's what you mean
If you enjoy this sort of thing, Jeff Vogel's Story About the Baby and Story About the Toddler may amuse you. Or not, I'm not the boss of you.
It is the source of what I think may be the smartest bit of parenting insight ever: "You can tell parenting is incredibly frustrating because they have to tell you not to shake the baby."
My grandson son mastered Alexa just after his 3rd b-day. He likes weather reports. For toddler reading I recommend "the big orange splot" which was enjoyed by my kids and now grandkids. Also George Washington's Cows". Most of the Berenstein Bears books are also a hit. I have a low shelf so kids can choose what they want.
You're making me too optimistic about having kids. My parents will curse you and me both, but thank you for this delightful read.
I'm surprised you say this - if anything, I worry I'm only writing about the hard and annoying parts.
If you mean "you're making me optimistic that many of the hard and annoying parts will be hilarious", that one's true, although more true in retrospect or when you're reading about them happening to someone else.
Sounds like the outdoor fun scale:
https://sketchplanations.com/the-fun-scale
Type 1 Fun is enjoyable in the moment, eg an all inclusive beach vacation.
Type 2 Fun is miserable while it is happening, but enjoyable in retrospect, eg running a marathon, backpacking in a foreign country.
Type 3 Fun is not enjoyable whatsoever, but you can at least tell a cool story, eg breaking your legs while alpine climbing.
(Type 0 fun is planning your beach vacation?)
I'm going to sound like a curmudgeon here, but pretty much everything in this post sounds like it would be unpleasant to actually experience in the role of the parent. The post is mostly about toddlers screaming - I chuckle at my mental image of the toddlers screaming at Scott, but it doesn't make me want to have a toddler scream at me.
I personally know several people who seem to love parenting toddlers (although not necessarily during the time the toddlers are screaming) but I thought that this was due to some mind-controlling effect that only functioned through sustained direct exposure.
A friend of mine asked me just before they had a baby, “but how is the diaper changing? Is it.. really difficult?” And I had to think for a bit to remember that diapers were a thing. It’s wild — as parents you are essential immune to it. These (beautifully written) things above are happening 30+ times a day FOR YEARS, and it is so easy compared to the actually difficult stuff (orchestrating friend meetups, navigating school choices, staying present), it’s really not on our minds at all.
I thought diapers would be annoying, and I mean, it is annoying how many there are, but it's not really gross. I far prefer changing diapers to dealing with the cat's litter box. I'll happily change dozens of diapers in exchange for my wife handling the stupid litter box.
Standard diaper and standard litter box are both quite neutral. Cat vomit on the carpet is bad. Overflowing diapers are the worst.
Also, why do cats always vomit on carpets?
I used to have a cat that would poop in the shower, which was annoying, but much easier to clean than the carpet.
FWIW, I felt the same & I have 3 young kids.
It's hard to tell how much exaggeration for comedic effect there is here (An enormous amount or only a large amount?), but even accounting for that this struck me as overly permissive parenting resulting in poorly behaved kids.
*One's own* toddler definitely has some sort of magical spell where fairly mundane or even obnoxious behaviour becomes utterly delightful, but overall I think a lot of the enjoyableness of my kids comes from a mixture being lucky with their natural temperament & deliberate work moulding their behaviour so that it is normally pleasant.
Reply to me that doesn't show up here:
>I also have three kids, although mine are now much older. One was a challenge at this age, one was a breeze, and one was a hellcat. A lot comes down to genetics and luck. I don’t read “permissive parenting” and “poor behavior” here. I read one easy kid and one challenging kid who are TWINS! Some kids truly are more difficult than others to parent. From your name I’m going to assume you’re a man, so maybe the term “mommy wars” means little to you. But I lived through the mommy wars, and it’s often best not to make judgments about how others are parenting. P
I should have added more caveats about how I have no concerns for Scott's kids and this is all probably well within the window of perfectly acceptable parenting.
It really is fun and hilarious! Some more frustration, but a lot more joy. It's just that the frustration is stuff anyone can relate to, whereas relating the joy is like trying to explain romantic love to a pre-pubertal child. Even if they're very bright, they're still unlikely to really *get* it.
As a childless old, I absolutely adored this post. More, please.
I'm curious if you're familiar with "parental selection" as a model in evolutionary biology.
My guess is that your wife is, fwiw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_investment
The main upshot is that "sibling rivalry" etc has plausible evolutionary justifications, rather than just being obviously an evolutionary mistake, or random flukes.
(To be clear I'm usually fairly skeptical of evo-psych stuff, just one interesting model among many).
Yeah, we're familiar. The twins seem to like each other a lot, though. On the rare occasions when one of them is missing, the present one constantly asks where they are. This isn't to say there are no fights, but overall they're pretty positive on one another. Sometimes they will even give up rare toys or food to the other, if they expect them to like it more. Which I guess is also what evolutionary theory would predict.
The blossoming friendship between my toddlers (not twins but close together) has been *by far* the most rewarding thing of the past two years for me. Not even close. Right now they're cuddled up on the sofa under a blanket with the older reading a book to the younger one.
Oh, giving the impression of liking each other is just how you win the parents affection.
Subconsciously you still sabotage the other. But consciously you love them, so your parents reward you for being a good offspring.
Similar to how mother and fetus are said to be at war, but they are also obviously cooperating.
(Just to be clear, the above is a just-so story. I don't actually believe it.)
Surely in the ancestral environment toddlers were never left to sleep alone. No wonder they hate it.
Your Muzzka story reminds me of one of my favorite stories from when my own kid was a toddler:
Mom: What do you want to eat?
Kid: Wazzamezzun!
Mom (getting out watermelon, his favorite fruit): Wazzamezzun?
Kid: No, wazzamezzun!
Mom: Watermelon?
Kid: Yes, wazzamezzun!
This is so delightful and funny, and is also such a good insight into toddlers! Thank you for sharing
This was a discussion between another ACX reader and me (his dad) in 1992:
Son (almost 2): "Watch Yemmen Wye-un!"
Me (reaching for the appropriate VHS tape): "OK, I'll put on Yemmen Wye-un."
Son: "URRR! Say it proper-wee!"
Me: "OK, Lemon Lion it is."
Very cute. Also: I don’t think children hear the difference in their own speech? I apparently had a speech impediment enough such that they tried to correct it at school with a speech therapist one year in grade school, and throughout I remember trying to please her while not being able to hear what she was telling me I was doing.
Oh yes.
"Look mummy, dake!"
"Dake?"
"Yes! Dake!"
"I'm not sure what you mean, what is dake?"
"No, not dake! DAKE!" (points at cake)
"Oh, you mean cake?!"
"YES Mummy. DAKE! Not dake!"
I don't know how they found it, but our kids were the ones who discovered "Yum Yum Breakfast Burrito" and the classic, "It's Raining Tacos". They also love to play inane video game music, but they know they'll only get away with that when the parents aren't around because we generously use our veto.
I also recommend, "What does the Fox Say?" as a song for that age.
After 38 years of no children - falling in love a few years prior means I have 17 & 16 year old young men as children so I’ll be sure to start handing out ideas and information and thoughts in oh 14-15 more years.
Kai is correct, the moon *is* objectively the most wonderful and beautiful thing in the entire universe 😁
Songs about mothers seem to be extremely sentimental in every culture. Fathers don't seem to get the same level of attention, the only thing I can (hesitantly) recommend is the JCB Song from about twenty years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGkseGFQLh4&list=RDrGkseGFQLh4&start_radio=1
Aesthetics are important. Probably evolutionarily if mysteriously so!
Toddlers know this, then have it beat out of them by the culture, by which I chiefly mean economists out over their skis.
My child at around three encountered the word “poem”. What is a poem, he asked?
Oh, well, it’s uh, pretty words.
“Like twinkle twinkle, little star?”
Why economicists?
Economists are almost comically accepting of people's preferences. They just want them to go about satisfying them efficiently.
Long statement of values.
Economist: that’s just aesthetics.
The only song I've ever come across that is extremely sentimental towards Dads is "Daughter" by Loudon Wainwright.
The Dad is not actually mentioned, but the subject matter and the male voice singing it makes it an extremely sentimental, very simple, song about Dad's. And sentimental in a good way. I'd recommend it to Scott if he's looking for a good Dad song that sentimentally expresses the feeling of being a Dad.
"That my Daughter in the water, everytime she fell I caught her. Everytime she fell....."
A link to the song if anyones interested....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykI9vOSCcb4
German singer/songwriter Reinhard Mey wrote an entire album of songs about being a dad, called Mein Apfelbäumchen (my little apple tree).
Austrian singer/songwriter Rainhard Fendrich also has a few.
It is remarkably striking how similar your son sounds to my 3 year old son. The emergencies are near identical :D
My twins are 4. It hasn’t gotten better yet. At least yours can’t swap identities.
Oh, and they don’t ONLY sabotage each other’s education. They sabotage everything. Also they’re each other’s best friends. And if you accidentally try to put the wrong color shoes or pants on a twin* there will be bloody vengeance wrecked upon you.
*because my twins are identical they have color coded soft pants and shoes. Nacho is navy, Gus is green or gray. There is a MNEMONIC for identifying my twins which my entire parish now knows.
You...you're using clever pseudonyms and didn't actually name a child Nacho, right?
Nacho is the nickname for all Ignacios (like Bob for Robert)
Thank you 😂
I do very much enjoy watching people be puzzled by the name
Unless you are in a majority-Spanish area you have done something very mean to that kid.
> Dayenu is die die die song
I was about to question how often this song would be relevant to you but I remember being in 2nd grade and singing it on the playground for in the middle of winter, so I guess the appeal is universal.
My experience is that all of the remotely-Jewish young children I know get obsessed with Dayenu. There's something about it that's really catchy.
Your children are adorable. My son is part German so I get a lot of Nein! Nein! Nein! He also says I WANT NEIN! Which is pretty funny.
Oh man, German-American toddlers, I can only imagine!! (not assuming yours is American but):" MINE! NEIN! MINE! NEIN!"
Like Hogan’s Heroes, but toddlers!
I'm fascinated by the idea that you have standard pairings with the twins (you/Kai, mom/Lyra). I would have thought that the obvious thing to do would be to deliberately switch it up so no one bonds more with one rather than the other, either just alternating or doing it by some similar mechanism (e.g. if some of the pair-offs are caused by gender (each taking the appropriate twin to the bathroom or something), then have the same-sex parent do that and switch off for all the others). I am assuming that you thought this through and came to a different conclusion (and as a father of only one child I certainly don't mean to suggest my idea is better). Can you explain what's behind your thinking?
A lot of it was child-driven - they each seem to vibe more with one parent. And it's useful to have a Schelling solution of who takes point on each child so we're not constantly litigating it.
Makes sense. Thanks
We had the same; it just worked out that way. They're fine with either of us if it's solo parenting time, but given the choice they vibe more with one (luckily different one).
sorry to state what might be obvious to you - occasionally switch
They probably do.
This reminds me of a friend of mine's story of when they picked up their kids after a week with their grandparents. His three year old daughter ran up to him excitedly and went "daddy daddy look! It's mommy!"
... I hope you didn't get SWAT'ed :heart: that's very worrisome
How could you allow your children to prefer SuperSimpleSongs to Raffi? 😭
“The whole time, he screams “MY FOOD! MY FOOOOOOD!” like a demented leprechaun being dragged away from his Lucky Charms.”
Such a brilliant line! I literally laughed out loud.
Beautiful! You must be such a good dad.
Wait till you get to the point where the form of bedtime resistance is "but if you make me go to sleep now I'll lose my Triple XP boost on Duolingo!"
Playing Guess-the-song is great fun. One or two are easy - my kid uses "wise men say" for Can't Help Falling in Love With You. But then you get "battle noise" (Two Little Boys) and the other day we tore our hair out trying to guess "princess song". It turned out to be Love Story by Taylor Swift. Also "'nother cracker" morphs effortlessly into Frère Jacques and back.
On the emergency thread -- when my oldest was between 2 and 3 I took him to our community center to swim. In the locker room, a very large man was also getting ready for the pool. My son pointed directly at him and started yelling "Fat man! Fat man!" in the same type of unstoppable loop you described applying to buses and trains.
I'd successfully blocked that memory out until now, so thanks for that! :)
I remember going to a garage sale in the early 80s with my first son. We did not watch television but you know, kids pick up on things very easily. We walked in and there was a short, slender black man looking items over. At the time there was maybe 5% black people in our community. He looked at him and said, "Look! It's Mr. T!!!"
Ha! Yeah, my daughter looked wide-eyed at the bearded tattooed pierced man behind us at the grocery store and said "Look, Mom, it's a bad guy!"
Payback for me at two seeing a man with a 70s-big Afro and yelling "Mom, it's Mickey Mouse!"
That unearthed a memory from when I was ~5?: asking a random woman at the daycare pickup, "Are you pregnant or just fat?"
My parents were, I'm sure, simultaneously amused & mortified (probably more one than the other, depending on what the truth was).
We were at the airport and my nephew bumped into a woman wearing a burka coming out of the lift, and loudly said ‘oh no it’s Darth Vadar!’
I have seared in my own memory an incident when, answering a knock on the door, I called out to an older brother, “Your friend is here.” Which one, he called back. Not meaning rudeness, but very rudely obviously, I called back: “The fat one.”
My brother was embarrassed and I was swiftly disciplined by my mother.
I can make myself feel bad about this at any time in the intervening almost fifty years.
It was truly terrible.
But it occurs to me oddly for the first time, that Miss Manners type training for all of us would have prevented the situation.
I should have been taught to answer the door in a formal and polite manner, and certainly my brother should have been taught not to demand who the visitor was in his hearing (a close friend actually!).
Hello. Please come in. I will go get my brother, etc.
One of my boys used to read Miss Manners and he'd bring the choice sections to us at dinner and we'd just laugh and laugh. She was so very clever and funny.
Miss Manners was exactly what we needed at that time, like Mary Poppins.
Much older parent here. Advice you didn't ask for: I would take away Alexa. Immediate gratification is very bad for little children. Delayed gratification is essential to live a good life, to be a good person, to be a good friend, sibling, parent, spouse, human. I also taught my children formal manners at an early age. You will not be sorry if you do this.
I don't disagree, but can I have some concrete examples of what constitutes correct delayed gratification?
Sure. A child says "I WANT MY SONG!!!" and the parent says, "Yes, that is a very nice song. I'll play it for you after lunch and before your nap, but right now, I'm busy doing adult things."
Or you say, "I'll set a timer, and you go pick up your toys and then we will play the song if your toys are picked up by the time it goes off. Otherwise, we will need to wait until after naps. It can be your 'waking up from naps' song."
A child wants a book that another child has. There is a metric ton of memetic desire in childhood. You say, "You can have that book when he is done. You have to wait." Or you could say, "I know you want that book right now, but if you can say to me, "Mama, I can wait until he is done to have that book" then I will make sure you get it next. If you can't say that, if you can't wait nicely, then we will try again tomorrow for the book."
Kids having access to something that gives them exactly what they want instantly is just training them for selfishness and self-absorption. You basically hardwire frustration and narcissism into how they interact with this magic world that gives them what they want, or weirdly does NOT give them what they want. When you raise children, you need to remember you are really raising adults. You have to keep in mind what the appropriate mature approach would be when you deal with things like this - and it isn't giving in or responding to the tyranny of a 3 year old as though they are in charge. I'm not saying Scott is doing that, but I am saying that Alexa is not good for children to have access to. And nipping selfishness in the bud always pays off later.
Ah, making it sound so easy, like someone who's forgotten what it's like!
I used to believe it was worth at least trying to follow advice like this, and then I met my actual children and realised that not only were they not blank slates ready to receive training, they in fact came with a full suite of programming for manipulating my own behaviour.
And these routines are independent of the ones they activate in other contexts. So when I "train" them to delay gratification, all that amounts to is a detail in the ongoing negotiation that is their relationship with me. It has very little to no impact on their behaviour in any other context, nevermind their personality.
I do what I outlined here on the regular with my grandchildren. I've been deeply involved in raising my own grandchildren since before my youngest started formal schooling. So I've had 45 non-stop years of raising little children. Several of my own grown children use these techniques. I will admit, of course, that your milage may vary from child to child. Some kids adapt well to reason. Some kids consider it an opportunity to leverage the fact that you are engaged with them to just hammer you down. Other kids decide that your little list of things you want is their most important list of things they do not want. I'm not saying it is easy, TTLX. I am saying it is necessary in order to civilize little human beings.
Also....you are absolutely right. They are NOT blank slates. They come with distinct personalities and I am always surprised with each new grandchild how different they all are.
I agree with this! Some other variants:
“Let’s see if we can tidy everything up first, and THEN we can do X.”
“We can’t read another book now because you’re really sleepy, but why don’t you choose which one you want, and we’ll leave it on the table, and then it’ll be ready to read when you wake up.”
To be fair, most of early parenthood is saying no to the unreasonable expectations of irrational little people. It ain't fun, but it's gotta be done.
I sort of get the impression that in affluent families made up of “exceptional” individuals, there is less of a feeling of constraint in this way. Like, we must instead teach them what having it all means, i.e. their lives will of course involve summoning Alexa for whatever they want; to pretend otherwise is perverse.
I agree with you about Alexa, for the stated reasons and perhaps another involving a tendency to make things less tranquil than they might be (admittedly a long shot with these two); but I don’t know how else to explain that your advice will probably seem contrarian and hopelessly retro to this crowd.
This is an interesting thought experiment for me. I did know kids raised in higher strata families, but this was half a century ago. Their parents, largely, had high expectations for them, and mostly they were good students and decent people. A little stuck up at times, but not too badly. A few of them went on to lives lived poorly. A few of them went on to become pretty successful and very stuck up. The really conservative ones went on to be successful, hard-working, creative, and interesting. Again. . . this was in another world.
Yeah, I'm unsure whether teaching delayed gratification, good manners, patience etc. at a young age has a huge effect on adult personality, but I'm very convinced that it makes kids much nicer to be around when they're a couple of years older.
It's really important for children to be polite and pleasant. People enjoy being around children who are. Even if it is just play acting at first, I think it eventually becomes habitual enough to be helpful. And it helps shy children to have a script.
Oh yeah, "Whale Did Swallow Jonah!" I liked that as a kid; been so long since I heard it!
(Good luck with your kids; they sound amazing.)
Having just got out of this phase, I thoroughly enjoyed this read. My twins just turned 4 and there's still some drama, but much, much less than a year ago where every single thing could lead to explosions. (How many arguments I had about which kid wants which spoon for oatmeal, and whether I should give them the spoon or they want to take it out themselves. Terrible reactions if you got this slightly wrong...)
I remember the biggest win was when it was possible for one parent to do bedtime on their own. This used to be impossible. But when one parent could do it on their own (some time before three years old I think) sometimes one of us could go out to work events or meet with friends again. Only rarely though, it was still a major drag for the other parent. And when both parents were home then both had to be fully involved in bedtime. Now at 4 years old it's pretty easy to get them to bed as one parent.
I will say though about that "no diaper change": our twins also refused to put on diapers at night time. So after they had turned two years old we gave them a chance to go without and they were potty-trained surprisingly quickly. It was 90% the kids pushing us to stop using diapers, not the other way round. So maybe just humor him and see how he does.
Strong recommend for Sandra Boynton's music! She can write every genre, Gregorian chant to show tunes to blues, and it's something the kids will listen to a zillion times, but the parents won't care because it's actually good.
Re: MUZZKA, my oldest, after a few failed attempts to say something understandable, would preface her unintelligible statement with "Ohhh!" because that was what we said when we'd finally figure it out and she thought that was the magic understanding word.
Yours are still a bit young for it, but I instituted "days" for each kid. We call it "coffee button day" because that was why I started it, so they wouldn't fight over who got to start my coffee in the morning, but it covers everything: who picks what we listen to in the car, who gets their book read first (or last if going last is the hot commodity), who gets the mail, who gets that one plate that doesn't match the rest, etc. I don't have to remember which of the six did the thing last, and I can just say "whose day is it?" when there's one of those minor-but-daily arguments. The leftover day is when Mom and Dad get what they want, that is, when there's not someone young enough to just rule; we once spent the *entirety* of a 3-hour car trip listening to "We Didn't Start the Fire" as that was what the toddler loved.
Since you don’t know how the 911 call happened, a theory:
iPhones have this feature where if you hold the lock button and volume up button for like ten seconds or so it’ll call emergency services. Helpful in some circumstances but easy to trigger accidentally. Last time I accidentally did it, it played a loud siren which let me cut the call in time, but a toddler might just see that as encouragement.
A quick AI search suggests something similar but easier to trigger exists on some Android phones: on Google Pixel you just mash the power button 5 times.
This is so interesting about the whole animal sounds thing. My son has level three autism and he's 12. He is still obsessed with any sound, and you can't just ignore the request for the sound that something makes--even something that doesn't make sounds. So even at church one Sunday, and on others since he first asked, he questioned, "what does the cross say?" He was referring to the brown wooden cross attached to the wall in the front of the church behind the pastor. So I said "creeeek" in a whisper. This seemed to satisfy him. He also loves music and can remember songs really quickly, along with rhythm and. I think the sounds and songs things are related.
My kids both went through a phase when they were pretty young where every time my wife and I touched each other, much less kissed or hugged, they'd interrupt and try to get our attention or physically push us apart. The idea of twins sabotaging each other's education feels completely plausible given this clear attempt to sabotage future siblings.
Kai does this too. "Daddy no pet mommy!" he declares, as soon as we sit next to each other. Sometimes unsuccessfully tries to drag one of us off. Lyra is much more chill about this, for whatever reason.
Alt account?
Wife account?
This sounds more like attention envy. "You can't kiss mum" because a) it's gross and b) your attention should be on ME is something ours did a lot.
Looking at that picture and reading the post makes me think of Raising Arizona:
H.I.: He's a scandal, isn't he? He's a little outlaw.
Ed: Naw, he—he's a good boy.
H.I.: He ain't too good. You can tell by that twinkle in his eye.
OK then. :)
Regarding the speech recognition problem: I desperately searched for a way to give the voice assistant device pre-prompts (like "children live here, if in doubt, play one of the following songs"). My current setup consists of a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant, their speech recognition device, and an OpenAI plugin. Not perfect, but it works reasonably well.
Using the same setup and a little bit of vibecoding, I created a dashboard that displays all favorite songs and audiobooks as images/buttons. You just have to click on them and then the stuff gets played. That was a much bigger game changer, and I highly recommend it.
My child's equivalent of this was badgering any phone she got access to for pictures of bats: "Otay doodoo, tow me pitah a bat" ("Ok google, show me pictures of bats")
I didn't have the variety of kids who are obsessed with Truck Tunes, but it's a hit for audiences who want songs about cement mixers etc. https://www.youtube.com/@twentytrucks
Is Alexa, on balance, helpful when dealing with toddlers? We've never set one up - (though we have a few that were gifted to us) - this post isn't exactly inspiring me with the feeling that I'm missing out, even ignoring the potential 9-1-1 call... (And I can't really throw stones as I did that once as a kid in the landline era, too)
It's not like we can avoid our child being aware of Alexa as a concept, since the local grandparents use them. Will be interesting once they start talking and see if they try to trigger Alexa at home, I guess.
The usual rule is that giving toddlers any type of nice thing will make your life harder because they'll keeping pushing your limits until they've demanded more than you're willing to give, and you should only do it insofar as you like seeing them happy when they get it. I think Alexa is in this category. But it is really cute when they do little dances to their favorite songs.
Exception if you already play them lots of music and they already demand more, in which case Alexa will just make your job there easier. I do hate it though, it finds a bunch of scummy ways to advertise to you, and it's really hard to set it to "don't interrupt me all the time with Amazon ads" mode. I only allow it in the house at all because my wife finds it helpful.
Fun fact - that Veggie Tales Jonah and the Whale song had a cult following among my high school class. One English teacher, who taught a Nature of Language elective class and was also a Lutheran minister, liked to use her own twins as case studies of language acquisition. I think she showed a video of them trying to sing it, or something. It got to the point that random people would start singing it in the hall and others would join in, and once someone managed to get it played over the PA system on a Friday afternoon.
Clearly there's some deep kabbalistic connection involving twins, linguistics, and the exegesis of the Jonah story, and music. In any case, I can't figure it out, I'm to busy singing and rapping it to my cat. Thankfully my wife is not here. The cat is not amused.
> I now think we’ll discover their long-sought ‘boy-friendly teaching methods’ around the same time we finally eliminate the ‘bro culture’ that prevents women from winning exactly 50% of physics Nobels.
Certainly it'll never happen as long as both genders are treated the same in the classroom, or even allowed in the same classes for that matter. Boys require a firm hand to be made to understand where they stand in the hierarchy. They lack the restraint to respect boundaries by default. The same applies to your kids, of course, though that's ultimately your loss.
Hot take: temperament and neurotype really are what gender is cracked up to be. You’re correct that different people have different essential natures, and their education/upbringing *has* to be shaped around that.
The Barbie/Ken system gets this dreadfully wrong in many cases, though. Please read more deeply into queer, neurodivergent, and hormonally atypical brains! They’re more common than you might think.
For example, at least a quarter of males have the HSP neurotype, which means they’re more “conventionally feminine” for social, educational, and disciplinary purposes. That sizable minority does very poorly when their peers and elders are only willing to see binary “girls” and “boys”.
Dr. Elaine Aron’s books are a good place to start learning about this. She’s the seminal researcher who developed the HSP framework.
What does "HSP" stand for?
Highly Sensitive Person?
The toddler boss will be a bit of a challenge to the feminised society.
> "Boys require a firm hand to be made to understand where they stand in the hierarchy. They lack the restraint to respect boundaries by default."
Nah. Historically and evolutionarily, boys and young men had been pretty good in finding their places in the hierarchy - which much less hassle than stereotypes dramatize. And you should check both modern sides on respecting the boundaries.
Gender equality maxing seems logical and virtuous. But consequences are bubbling up, as the first generations of max validated girls and earnestly shamed boys are growing up. We will learn more about "unfettered" women than Freud and Schopenhauer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npW9lC9MnZA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1JOGUnxBx8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrYyI8oqBvY
I'm going to become a paid subscriber just for the stories about your kids.
Lyra did once randomly decide to stick her fingers in my mouth. In retrospect this was on a day where I had eaten an inordinate amount of berries, which she might have been trying to rescue me from.
My daughter at age 2 did that when she woke up before me and found me sleeping. She’d stick her little fingers gently into my mouth, my nose, my ears. I think she was trying to find me.
I'm a guy and I have a twin sister. I remember approximately nothing from being a toddler, but a lot of this feels pretty familiar from what I do remember from being kids, especially the parts about reading. She read a lot, way more than I did, and I didn't think there was anything wrong with this, exactly, but I did want Things to Happen, and sometimes that made it hard to read. Because if Things weren't Happening, I would cause them to Happen. One time, I absolutely needed to know what Happens when you drip water on a lightbulb, so I tried it. It exploded (well, maybe imploded), because this was decades ago and it was an incandescent lightbulb. I thought this was fantastic because Something Happened, but she was pretty pissed off at me, for a while after.
I'm not sure there's a tidy way to summarize how this went as we got older, except that she was better at school and I was better at things like mountain biking, getting minor injuries. And I admired her ability to... tend to things? I am still a little envious that she's read so many more books than I have.
I’m 99.8th-percentile Autistic. I didn’t get identified until my thirties. With that in mind, I am *begging* you to consider that these are neurodivergent tells. I’m obviously biased, but they seem like glowing neon signs to me.
Life is so different when family and child have a container for all of this—the dysregulation, quirks, inscrutable requirements, fixative attachments, perseveration, alien axiology, transition resistance, constant bloody-murder distress… From the inside, what’s going on is a system of hidden (but real!) neurological needs that “normal protocols” rub against like a cheese grater. Environmental adjustments and some (unintuitive but eventually learnable) cross-cognitive empathy can make a *world* of difference for everyone’s outcomes and sanity. A dreaded but extremely common failure mode is for families to think that all of these puzzling differences are some sort of maturational or moral failure, or a comic punchline—depending on how pissed-off others feel—and to treat them as disciplinary issues. That’s a fast path to profound, chronic psychological injury and hermeneutical poverty for the kid. Please, PLEASE check out the possible Autism angle! 🙏
I’m happy to provide more information, resources, and articulate interior commentary if any of that would be helpful.
I’m not meaning to be rude, but have you ever met a toddler? Everything described in Scott’s post is very normal toddler behaviour.
It’s possible you’re right and I’m raising a false alarm. Also, it’s common for families/communities to explain away all the signs as “just normal XYZ behavior” or basically any narrative that dodges a deeper look at neurodivergence. I’m not certain what’s true here, but I’m certain the question should be investigated seriously. The consequences of a false negative are quite serious. Source: it happened to me.
These are the most normal toddlers I have ever heard of. Do you...spend any time around kids?
If Scott’s kids are acting this way in a couple years, something’s amiss. But right now, what they’re doing is normal behavior. It’s sort of like incontinence — normal now, definitely abnormal for older kids.
With all due respect, I appreciated your "every possible personality trait is caused by General Hyperreactivity Syndrome" speech at whichever conference it was you gave that at, but it doesn't make me confident that you have high sensitivity and specificity in diagnosing people with things.
"Everything about having toddlers feels like a permanent emergency."
And that, in a nutshell, is why I am childfree.
Best wishes to you and your family. Happy New Year!
It's a good sort of emergency! Like one of those wildfires that clears the forests and helps new things grow.
Many Thanks! Glad you find it so! Different people have different preferences. Have a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2026!
My kids head is like 99th percentile yours have got to be off the chart.
This was so lovely, thanks for writing it Scott
It makes me feel weird to keep commenting on posts about your family but since it’s always good to hear it: cute kids and sounds like you’re doing a good job.
"Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot. And there ain't any real difference between triplets and an insurrection." - Mark Twain, Speech on the Babies
In short term, two children are more work than one. In long term, two children are less work than one, because they will spend a lot of time playing together, while the only child would always want to interact with you.
When exactly the long term starts, probably depends a lot on the age difference between the children. So I would guess that for twins it starts earlier. Probably at 4 or 5 years?
Sounds like kittens. As a childfree old with 5 cats, I tend to mentally relate all small children stories with cat behavior and there are some definite similarities, though thankfully fewer constant emergencies.
Wow, surprisingly similar language there!
“Unfortunately, Kai has been reading the How To Be A Toddler books, and they all say that you should never, under any circumstances, stop crying” One of our twins must have read the “How to Be an Extreme Toddler” version - if we let them cry for more than 5 minutes they would inevitably start vomiting due to some strange sensitive gag reflex interaction with intense crying. Bluff called. We obviously did not end up doing any form of cry it out 😂
I believe you are right with your evolutionary anthropology theory of antelope spotting. I would only add it does not go far enough. Our forebears in the african savannah, lacking the right physiology to be stealthy or to outright fight the lions, naturally took the other competitive strategy available, intimidation; just like the hyenas. We were the noisiest, smelliest motherfuckers in the savannah, and throwing stones to boot. That's why we whoop and raise our arms after our team scored a goal: instincts for shooing scavengers away from our kill.
In the wild, the loudness of another animal's voice is great evidence for the size of its lung and upper body. Very loud voices elicit flight responses... and shouting or singing IN UNISON hijacks that! For humans it even comes with a substantial oxytocin release, giving us a physiological incentive to keep doing that winning strategy of collective intimidation.
That explains why toddlers are making so much noise: they're instinctively doing their part! But of course the next step for them is to learn to do it unanimously, in unison, because that shoos away the lions more effectively.
A hail of many stones would get
a lion to turn back.
Collective shouts could voice a threat
a single voice would lack.
The parenting upshot is that there's a big difference between just hearing songs, and singing along with them. The latter leads to much more harmonious situations, in my extensive experience.
Й
This entire piece is familiar and charming.
I wanted to say thanks for years of insight — your earlier essays really helped me build better mental models of how the world works. Lately I’ve found myself missing that more zoomed-out, pattern-focused style, as the writing often feels centered on ongoing US/AI emergency framing.
One small, personal example that came to mind while reading The Permanent Emergency: as young parents with our first child, the instructions to the babysitter were basically “call immediately if the baby seems unhappy.” Years later, with our second child, they were closer to “don’t call unless there’s blood.” Experience shifted our sense of risk, proportion, and what actually matters.
I’ve always valued your ability to step back and explain those kinds of patterns rather than react to the latest crisis, and I hope we’ll see more of that mode again — I think many other readers would welcome it too.
I know what you mean but I don't think that's necessarily a good idea. I mean there are only so many good big picture mental model ideas that one person can have during a time period and the authors who start trying to force that stuff end up much worse.
He's writing a great deal more now so not everything can be an insight boiled down from years of experience.
---
Regarding your example I think that raises a very important point -- the same instructions mean very different things to different people. For instance, an introverted highly anxious and self-critical person like Scott Aaronson hears the way we talk about male sexual attraction to women and feels guilty about even thinking that he might be interested in someone while saying anything more nuanced seems to lead other young men to think "yah she totally wants me to send her this dick pic"
I think a big issue in our current society is that looser social connections and mass media make messages far less targeted to the individual. Some babysitters will hear the later message and not call anyone if it's not arterial spray others will call for the slightest scratch. If you know your babysitter you can tailor the instructions.
Interesting points, and I largely agree. That said, a bit less alarmism—and fewer “catastrophe of the minute” takes—would be very welcome, not just for me.
One idea: Scott could tag posts more explicitly (e.g. futurism, mental models, parenting, alarmism, AI-will-kill-us-soon). That would make it easier for readers to decide whether to dive in or skip a post, without diluting the content itself.
I found this post very entertaining, but would enjoy a “wisdom” post on child rearing - however, I expect I will be dead by the time he is ready to discourse on that.
This was so relatable! I have a lot of the same difficulties as you with my children. Interestingly, my wife gets better outcomes. I'm puzzled by the difference in our experiences.
One possibility is that she just has better vibes. My daughters demands will eventually make me lose my cool on some level and even if I don't articulate it that emotional reaction comes through and our daughter knows she's making headway in the power struggle or feels unsafe.
Another is that she has an incredible bullshit detector. I have to parse each toddler request for more food or milk as potentially valid while my wife confidently and consistently rejects almost every attempt at stalling. She is a brick wall with chill vibes and our daughter feels safe in the knowledge that the bedtime routine will happen according to the plan. There is no way to insert an emergency. This is a hard road as sometimes demands for food, water, additional affection, or urban jungle identification have to be dismissed out of time as illegitimate at this time. I think our toddlers feel safer understanding their place in the hierarchy with her than with me.
This confidence, consistently, and good vibes is really hard for me to emulate. It's a lot of soft skills and intuition rather than hard and fast rules which toddlers seek to exploit with loopholes.
My children definitely responded to vibes. The two boys responded very well to the strong, confident, silent type that a few men in their life exemplified, and were total chaos for anyone else. My daughter needed flowery love and affection to get anything done and would be devastated if I treated her like her brothers.
Dealing with them individually was fine, but when together I basically had to decide who was going to be happy and who would be upset.
That’s a good point, and I wonder if it argues for - what some of us “of an age” reading this might be thinking, having never experienced anything of this kind as children - a sort of consistency that pleases no one.
I can't read your whole comment since substack is a pile of shit and just cuts off after "jungle identification", but everything up to that sounds extremely familiar.
Of course, I have Aspergers, while my wife is highly sensitive, so that explains some of it.
I remember all of these things! One trick that ‘worked’ for us (relatively speaking) was setting a “last food alarm” to go off 30 minutes before actual bedtime. It didn’t work if we just said “are you hungry? If so, eat something now so you don’t panic at bedtime” because we’re just parent chumps. But if The Phone goes off, that’s official and not to be argued with. So the mad dash for further cereal, bagels, and fruit would happen in enough time for us to then at least not have that particular delay tactic available at actual bedtime
Yes, alarms are great. Timed illumination changes ("bedtime lighting", "green light is GO, means get into shoes and jacket, we're going out") complement them nicely.
Why are you giving in to his demands to change the song every 10?
Yeah that’s a great question. All the therapy talk of recent years has warped people in to believing that you are obligated to give in to your kids demands.
Saying "Alexa, change the song" a few times = happy children dancing and humming and letting me do my thing otherwise.
Refusing = children screaming until I can distract them with something else.
I'm sure in your imagination, if I just stand firm a few times they'll learn that having consistent preferences is important and they shouldn't scream about this, but I think that skill might take until they're three.
Insisting that my boys say "please" helped me with the constant irrational requests at that age. It forced them to surrender the sense of power that they got from making everyone around them jump and imposed a small transaction cost in the form of humility. It was also good for my own sense of self-respect and need to reclaim some degree of control over my life.
My older son went through a phase right around his second birthday when he flatly refused to say "please" and would rather scream non-stop for two hours than say "cookie please" and get a cookie. We eventually compromised and allowed him to save face by saying "you're welcome" instead of "please."
Ok but have you gotten to the phase where they repeatedly ask you what the moon is doing up during the daytime and you have to repeatedly explain to them that they authors of an alarming number of children's books are either very confused about the moon or just lazy but they don't really buy it and just keep asking?
My own Lyra would often not tolerate books being read at all and her brother often looked at them upside down. They both became enthusiastic readers despite our general lack of success at reading aloud together, and the notes they leave each other in the books they're reading on their e-readers are pretty hilarious. Plus when he taught himself to read he could read as fluently upsidedown as right side up for a while so that was cool.
Kai also read books upside-down much more often than chance when he was young, although now that he is two he seems to have grown out of it.
I have twins. Raising kids in bulk required special techniques and I would often strap them both in to their car seats and drive them to sleep at night. Which seems easy enough, but if I stopped they would know it and it was an Emergency. They would both say "oh no. We are stuck! We are stuck!" They are 11 now and I repeat their phrase back to them on the occasions where appropriate. My daughter never fails to hate it.
Boy-girl twin toddlers seem like a natural comedy act. I hadn’t realized that!
I deeply sympathize with the awkwardness of the twins' method of requesting "Dayenu." My daughter's word to request "The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly" was also "Die," and for several months she had a habit of enlivening our church's worship services by suddenly demanding it at the top of her lungs.
Yeah, kids mispronouncing things at the top of their lungs suddenly is an issue. Kai sometimes gets VERY excited about trucks, and intermittently pronounces "truck" as either "fuck" or "cuck".
I can never tell from Scott's descriptions whether all the screaming and shrieking is relative to a quiet Saturday afternoon reading, or other toddlers, or only described that way due to misophonia.
You must not have had a toddler. It’s real. They are tiny and naive, but extremely powerful presences. They have more control than the parents over how life feels moment to moment.
I suspect the cops were called by a neighbor walking by who heard lots of screaming. When I lived in Cambridge MA, this would happen to us and our friends all the time (friends from church community with lots of kids). I think these well-meaning passerby typically had limited experience with toddlers
My daughter recently threw her pancake to the dog, laughed as he ate it, looked down at her plate and started crying because her pancake is gone.
“Don't worry if you choose the wrong one they'll let you know by screaming” this is both 🤣🤣🤣 and like one thing that is actually delightful about very young kids vs adults. The needs are more finite (usually enemurable) and the expressions of whether they are being met are very clear (also enumerable, often overly audible) so you pretty much know where you stand. The permutations on this for an adult are so vast often they themselves have no clue.
I'd love to see the copy of How to be a Toddler these rascals are passing around
The feet in the snack photo. The little pink feet.
The feet!
Also, here’s a trick that sometimes derails an oncoming screamo mode: Lean towards them, look like you have something very important and secret to say, and whisper. You do have to have something to say that will capture their attention, but their attention is pretty easy to capture unless they’re in screamo mode! For screamos over the wrong music, it can be the right music. Or you can say it’s a surprise, and they have to come see it. Possible good surprise: get a little cheap projector that throws images from your phone on the wall. Have a bunch, and don’t show them all — only one, on each occasion. Kai would probably like that big moon picture projected. Or pictures of the kids, or of you. (And I recommend asking Lyra to name or show you some pictures she likes a lot. That will help compensate for Kai’s tendency to take over the personal preference space.) In some situations you can try making the picture brighter or dimmer contingent on how cooperative they’re being.
I make fun of David Friedman for his oft-repeated statement that children are “just small people who don’t know very much”. I have a series of blog posts in which I demonstrate the incorrectness of his statement by relaying stories about my kids. This post does the job very nicely indeed.
I have the unfortunate suspicion that no one in your house called the police. Perhaps someone called pretending to be inside the house to hassle you or made some kind of complaint that you were on drugs or abusing children and the police lied out of concern for retaliation against that individual if you knew the real reason.
Or it's quite possible they just got the wrong house.
I honestly think boy friendly education isn't that hard. It's just competition based and rewards doing hard things not concentiousness, e.g., it's the hard problem put up at the start of the semester in math class that solving gives an immediate A for the term, it's letting you do a really hard EC on the exam to erase all your missed homework and it's posting the top grades in a class on an exam (no need to humiliate the bottom) so boys can compete against each other.
Will it make the medians equal, of course not. But that's not so important, not everyone needs to be great at everything, but it will let those who are really good at something excel without general conscientiousness and with more competitive rewards.
Unfortunately, all incentives for instructors are for reducing failures and very little reward for helping anyone do better than whatever is deemed an A (even though that is almost all that matters as far as society is concerned after elementary school).
Yeah, OK, but must you call it "boy friendly?" I'm female, and was quite competitive intellectually all the way through school. In the early grades I was like Hermione, hand always up bouncing in my seat with from wild eagerness to give the right answer. Kind of obnoxious, I know! Fortunately I outgrew that. When long division got easy and we didn't move on to something else, I worked on getting faster by doing timed competitions again my own record. When the teacher told us there is no way to trisect an angle, I spent several hours over the next week trying to do it. Near the end of high school I was still at it, asking people their SAT scores, trying to sound casual, but actually trying to find out if anyone did better than me.
I was not, though, boisterous the way boys are, though I was no saint -- just broke the rules by passing notes rather than by being disruptive in other ways. And I wasn't all that rare, either. There were a couple other girls in my year in school who were like me, in fact one was amongfmy chief rivals. All 3 of us turned out straight, too, if that matters. And of course once I got to college and grad school I met lots of smart women who wanted to fucking *win*. My best friend in college now holds a chaired professorship at a top law school and I see her quoted in the New York times fairly often. Oh yeah, and my daughter is ranked at the state level in rock climbing. I do agree that there are more males than females with this temperament, but ambitious, competitive women are hardly as rare as hen's teeth. For women in academia or in fields with arduous training I'd say a good 10% have that temperament.
I was speaking about statistical generalities because that's the context to which I was responding to (obviously there is huge overlap in the distributions so there will be many girls who prefer the more competitive style and vice-versa) but you raise an important point -- it really shouldn't be about whether it's boys or girls but giving people who respond best to different learning styles that option. And yes, obviously if we do offer the option it shouldn't be labeled in a gendered fashion.
The difficulty is figuring out who does respond to which. There is a genuine tension here that while some people are motivated by competition others are scared away.
I and that kind of.education and mates it..I was c!early in the .minority , though.
Closest I came to having a SWAT team break down my door….was also because my toddler threw a temper-tantrum loud enough that the developmentally disabled teen next door (he was a sweetheart and was just trying to help) called the cops on me. 🤣
You didn't ask but I advise getting rid of the listening device (cum instant gratification machine) and get them a Yoto player instead.
Caspar Babypants, he of the band The Presisents of the United States of America, is an excellent musician for children.
Reccomendation for Nick Cope's songs for small people, he has a series on the bbc with animations but you can find his songs on Spotify and what not. Ralph is a rusty robot was a personal favourite...quite the catalogue.
You can get them both Yotos so they can both listen to what they want
I believe you’re missing the fact that you’ve spent the majority of their lives naming things for them. You should check out David Lancy’s Chattle, Cherubs, and Changlings.
To fill in Lyra's bedtime routine a little bit:
I request she walk to the changing table, and she cooperatively waddles over in exchange for getting to play with my smartwatch as she gets changed. Hot commodity with the kids: it has a moon on it, they repeatedly inform me.
She also grabs a random new small object to put in her room almost every other night, usually a duplo. Kai by contrast insists on complete and pristine room minimalism before he'll sleep, with the lone exception of his stuffed dog. He will point and scream and adamantly refuse to fall asleep, until any and every room invader is put out. But Lyra clearly got my cluttery maximalist gene.
(One of the only ways in which she is overtly trying to sabotage Kai back, is that during the day she will deliberately place small objects in Kai's crib. I think she just cannot understand why he would possibly want an almost completely toy-less room. To be fair, I feel about the same way around Scott's room sometimes.)
I offer her 3 books, and she ritualistically insists on adding a 4th after, all of which I read to her. I refuse to read her a 5th. Her current favorite is "Lil Pookie," about an adorably-nicknamed anthropomorphic piglet whom she correctly identifies as sharing in her enjoyment of macaroni and books. Her second favorite is Jamberry, a book centered on berries that also has a train in it (Kai: Train is Best Page).
She then insists on brushing her teeth by herself. I've gotten some mileage out of pretending teeth are a train track, and convincing her she *wants* to make the "chugga chugga" noise from when the brush encounters her teeth. When I say it's time for lights-out, she climbs up on the couch and turns off her own light.
Then she snuggles up to 3-5 different stuffed animals in bed, hugs at least one (and possibly all) of them, and waits for me to put something like 5 different blankets on top of her.
She occasionally has tummy troubles or otherwise needs an extra walk around the block, but she typically goes right to bed and sleeps like an angel until morning. When she wakes up, she quietly plays in her own room by herself for about an hour (also angelically), before finally knocking on her door and making noises to be let out, to face ~~Kai our boisterous morning boy~~ the day.
She's lower energy and less impulsive, when contrasted to Kai. Overall effect is that she acts a bit more like a dispositionally-helpful miniature adult with strong mood-swings. If she's in a good mood, I can sometimes task her to fetch things for me.
That sounds very sweet. I think I had a maximal possessiveness gene. My things. My precious sleeve of Lifesavers, etc. This surfaced, embarrassingly, in adulthood. A niece had developed and been indulged in the habit (which I really think was not a good one) of needing to “take one thing away” to her own house when leaving my mother’s house. Thus one time we had out my old Fisher Price barn and animal set, and I noticed the cow was absent. “Oh, I think ****** took it home one day.” (To disappear into her mess! She has so many toys and I just have this set, which is worthless without the cow waah!)
Something like a panic attack was happening within me though I tried to act normal, being as I was about 38.
Relatable? I don't enjoy cleaning, but I compulsively do it now, because I HATE if Scott throws my stuff out when he tries to clean! He doesn't cook, and he has no idea which things I actually use.
I need things to be either where I put them, or visibly out. But the later drives him nuts.
At one point the neutral cooking oil disappeared on me, and when I asked him he went 'We have olive oil, did you really need a second oil?"
(I ended up snapping at him about it, not my proudest moment. It was 3pm on a particularly tough day with the twins.)
Honestly for many years when we were younger, if someone came into our house and my husband asked them if they wanted a drink, there would follow an embarrassing moment when he would open more than one cabinet to find the drinking glasses. This was partly a reflection of his life having nothing whatever to do with cooking but more because the kitchen was so much my unchallenged domain.
If Scott cleans acceptably, so that you don’t have to come behind him - and wrings out the rag or sponge at the end! - that’s a win I suppose. But he definitely must not cook a great deal if he didn’t know about the roles of various cooking oils!
I think it’s kind of cool to have a non-cooking husband by the way. I feel we are unicorns. And their minds are on other things than food.
I wonder too if your boy is reacting to his sister or to you all, with his minimalism - sort of, you guys don’t seem to understand what’s important at any given moment! Things are not all the same!
This is hilarious! After a rough day with our toddlers, this made me laugh. Thank you!
These are not "mildly scummy" musicians, just working musicians adapting to the changes. The Song-Poem Society is an example of mildly scummy musicians:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33Z71dFvsU0
my 13 month old boy is much more chill than that. He likes to "DJ" the books but he finishes the book half the time. There is very little screaming when we refuse something he wants, because he knows that won't change our minds and he is quick to move on to some other idea rather than sulking. He cries for 2-10 minutes when he goes down for a noon nap, but at bedtime he almost always just goes straight to sleep with no fuss. (our baby bedtime routine which I originally thought was overkill: Bath in 99F water measured by an infrared thermometer. Wrap in cute baby towel (he usually cries during that part). Carry him to the nursery. Put on his diaper and hanna onesie (he usually cries during this part). Feed him a formula bottle (formerly 6oz, now 4oz as my wife is eager to get him completely off of formula ASAP and I'm lackadaisical about it). Then we put him in the crib with his Tommy Tippee stay put ultra light pacifier, and his Jellycat snuggle puppy, and his sleep sack. Then he goes right to sleep with minimal crying. In general he very rarely cries without a really good reason (tired, hungry, fell down, diaper changes, or we prevented him from stealing dog food within the last 5 seconds). I am pleasantly surprised that he follows some rules at 13 months: He reached to unplug the aura frame and I said no, so he gave up and went to the other outlet to unplug mom's laptop and I said no, so he took his hand away from the outlet and got a proper toy.
Scott, it's very likely that you have already answered this question elsewhere and in-depth, but I am too irregular a reader to know where to find it - do you have a list of recommended reading / listening / absorbing-by-osmosis material for potential parents-to-be? My partner and I are now talking about having kids, and thus I am now scrambling to add to my meager knowledge of this great endeavor.
Emily Oster, "Expecting Better". At least one book that reassures you about when it's fine to let your kids cry it out to get to sleep (I know I'm sort of contradicting myself, but this has already worked a few times, Kai's bedtime troubles just keep creeping back in different forms)
"Listen" is an absolute gem.
I wonder if twins’ speech clarity is a little hindered because they are listening as much to their opposite number as to a parent.
But it also seems possible if recorded music were not the default/ if Alexa didn’t exist, and you had only sung the song to him, he would have to fall back on singing it himself, which would be practice in … saying “Rockin’ Robin” for Alexa.
But much less funny. I like all the iterations.
I dunno. Probably children’s minds just run past their vocal apparatus. (Especially in a fast-paced, quickly changing environment such as your household!)
My child had a very short period of indistinct speech, though it was so cute (to us) while it lasted. But our lives were comparatively dull. He didn’t yet know the names of everything though. He was about your children’s age when he came in and said to me, worriedly, “Mommy, I turned something on”.
Can you tell us what it was?
“I cannot” he said simply, but distinctly. (It was the window AC.)
"Listen" is a wonderful book that will make your life easier.
Stay listening, Play listening, and setting limits, three listening tools described in the book, combine to diffuse most of the difficulties described above.
A lot of the book goes something like child has meltdown over x, I did the stay listening technique, and then child was perfectly fine after that forever. Which sounds kind of ridiculous but is fairly true in my experience.
My story the first time I tried it: The child I watch wanted to get picked up. We were in a situation where I wanted him to walk. I set the limit and told him that it was time for him to walk. He clamored to get picked up. I got down to his level, which increased the clamor at first because it's also the first move in getting picked up, and told him that I couldn't pick him up right now and that he had to walk. I continued to do the stay listening technique as well as I could, thinking there was going to be several minutes of this. But instead, after 20 seconds, he abruptly stopped, took my hand and started walking.
Forgot to add the link. https://a.co/d/eTDyZeV
When my oldest was around your kids' age she had similar bedtime delaying tactics. I eventually realized it was mostly that she didn't like sleeping in a room without one of her parents. Once we went back to sleeping in the same room it got a lot easier.
Our local children’s musician was a guy named Joe McDermott. We were ourselves too young (and selfish) as parents to do such things as submit to “Beatles for Babies” or whatnot, and we never purchased any made-for-kids’ music (for some reason, Big Band and bluegrass and Arthur Fiedler Boston Pops were our chief choices for little one) but we did inevitably see Joe McDermott live occasionally. It always made my husband sad/annoyed to hear mention of him. The guy had been in what he considered a pretty good college town indie group back in the day, before leaving “legit” music behind and pivoting to children’s performance.
It kind of fed into his feeling that our town, though celebrated for live music, had a weird way of sabotaging musical careers.
(Of course, a music snob makes such summary judgments as “hack” with much less thought then went into my typing the above, but it really was a backhanded tribute in this case.)
Now it seems like he made a brilliant decision, was ahead of the curve; but at the time having known of him “before” in his performances he always seemed to me a touch melancholy and subdued, which was not unappealing probably to the young mothers.
Oh man, I know how you feel. A year ago when my twins were three, I was just starting to feel like the permanent emergency was finally over. Then they both got some respiratory infection, we found out they had asthma and they were both hospitalized for a week.
After three unsuccessful visits to urgent cares for near constant coughing we finally got into the pediatrician in time for him to tell us their oxygen was dangerously low and call the wee-woo bus.
Somehow I was not expecting that.
They’re fine now. Thank god for Budesinide .
For us the “sun song” is “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas”.
Once you have paid him the Danegeld / You never get rid of the Dane.
Brutal lol.
> I can’t remember who said this, but I can’t unsee it - toddlers, much more than adults, are still running off evolved instincts that expect the ancestral environment and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
I believe - you - did, in your book review of The Secret Of Our Success? That’s what immediately came to mind to me at least.
The irony of talking about your toddlers like hunter gatherers while ignoring the fact that the defiant one is the boy and not the girl, while refusing to acknowledge that maybe a boy hunter gatherer ought to be raised differently compared to a girl hunter gatherer
My only recommendation is to consider real music. My two years old is a big Fleetwood Mac fan. Personally, I rather listen to that than to kid's music.
I tried that. The only real song my children like as much as their vapid nursery rhymes is Queen's "Bicycle Race". I think it's because it includes a word they know ("Bicycle") said very loudly, clearly, and repeatedly.
Maybe Mark Ronson's "The Bicycle Song"? Actually quality and you get to sing that you'll ride your bike until you get home many times
I think I was lucky because I never exposed my kids to the "toddler crack" songs. I don't think that there is anything wrong with them necessarily, but I don't want to hear them.
For repetitive songs they might like:
- Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac. Started being called "The Fairy Song" because of the intro. My kids (2 and 4) like singing "ooooooooaaaaaaaaaah, I wanna be with you everywhere" over and over.
- Jolene by Dolly Parton
- Wake Me Up Before you Go-Go by Wham!
- Purple Rain by Prince. They find the concept of purple rain amusing.
I once saw a comment on a YouTube video about Cry It Out that said Cry It Out was wrong because, "Did God leave us to cry it out?" and I thought this was a uniquely bad take.
The proper daddy song is "Daddy Dear" from Sesame Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWMAYFNIAco
Consider reading the book "Parent Effectiveness Training".
Or maybe this post is just for lulz.
Brother, you need to assert yourself with your kids. They will try, but you must make clear to them that you make the rules, they don't. You enforce the rules.
If it's bedtime, it's bedtime. They will survive going to bed hungry - they might even learn a lesson. But if you notice they've eaten at least a few bites, then know that they are manipulating you. That's developmentally appropriate for them to do, but it's developmentally inappropriate for you to kowtow to.
You are the f*cking parent. Act like it.
Same with brushing teeth and everything else.
The big rocks must be achieved, roughly at the same time every day, no matter what. And they must not be delayed much.
You are the f*cking parent. Act like it.
Kids who grow up experiencing adults who kowtow, who knows that any rule is flexible if they don't want to follow it, become the sort of unpleasant, unworkable, unskilled dullards we have too many of today.
You are the f*cking parent. Act like it.
Discipline and routine today forms a strong adult in the future. Weak parenting today forms a weak adult in the future.
You love them too much to be a coward when you are raising them. You are the f*cking parent. Act like it.
I appreciate this perspective, but I think as phrased it's too harsh.
I'm not convinced that my son really has enough common sense to eat before bed if he wants to. He's amply demonstrated bad judgment in many other ways, and he only just turned two.
So I start his bedtime routine five minutes early and give him five minutes to snack. I think this works better than having to listen to him sob all night because he's hungry, or breaking the bright-line rule that once he's in his crib he can't come out to eat.
When he's old enough that we can talk about these things together and I can be sure he understands them, my standards will be stricter.
A generational thing? Most older readers will probably be puzzled by the concept of “bedtime food”, food and bedtime having no connection that I’ve ever heard of until now.
But I think what/how children eat is maybe so different now. More like a series of snacks all day - healthy snacks I imagine. Whole foods.
Not so much meals nor so many carbs as used to fill our little bellies.
I’ve observed a friend’s grandchildren eating in this way. They have their ten things to eat whether yogurt or produce or something from a bag and are offered them as asked.
This is how I make sense of bedtime food, which otherwise seems like an option that might be skipped.
TL;DR: the desire for food not to be a “battleground” necessarily entailed the elimination of the idea of scheduled mealtimes.
Longtime reader, first time I’ve been moved to comment.
I’m a mom of two kids, 11 and 8. They each had a phase like this too but I didn’t let them run my household as tiny adorable irrational tyrants. I held my ground to let them know there is a hierarchy they need to respect. I’m not saying I did it perfectly! But they obey me without whining or arguing most of the time. If they disagree with a course of action they explain why, and I listen and sometimes adjust. I explain the limits I set when possible. They generally respect me and each other. I think this is the outcome you want? I got here by telling them no some of the time and sticking to it!
If this was written with some irony as a montage, or greatest hits, of giving into a tyrannical toddler - a failure reel - it is relatable and funny. But if this is what every day is actually like, you gotta set some limits.
Third theory - it’s rage-bait? Fourth - a cry for help? Intentions very unclear to me but well-written and entertaining as always.
Maybe I’m just thick as mud, but I don’t get the joke here “I now think we’ll discover their long-sought ‘boy-friendly teaching methods’ around the same time we finally eliminate the ‘bro culture’ that prevents women from winning exactly 50% of physics Nobels.)” Like are you saying boys sabotage their own education? Is it just a joke saying “boy friendly teaching methods” are fake?
Is this satire? You do realise you can do something to change it, right?
Your bed routine needs work. Warnings are useless, there needs to be a winding down routine.
I wonder if Grandma has some skills she could impart?
Saw all the hate on Twitter about this. Those people are ridiculous. You obviously do not need other people's affirmations, but for what it's worth I think the approach here is a good one.
In my experience, what you do as a parent has almost no impact on how kids behave. I know parents who were very hands-off progressive with well-behaved children and others who are monsters. Likewise, I know parents who were super-strict and some of their children turned into upstanding citizens and others are criminals.
A thing that amazed me with my own children is how early their personality is evident.
All of the parenting advice I have seen is mostly nonsense. For anyone with kids: do your best, put in a sincere effort; beyond that no particular strategy matters.
I'm not sure "daddy-blogging" is going to increase substack subscriptions, but this was cute.
I don't understand the food-at-bedtime thing. Why don't you just say no?
Hi Scott,
I'm mostly a lurker, but, as someone in a very similar situation (first kid as a 40 year old parent, etc), I wanted to say I find your kids and your family adorable, and my wife laughed when I read her the bit about the secret "how to toddler" book.
I'm sharing this because I saw a bunch of random cruelty/condescension on social media for something I thought was exceptionally wholesome, and I figured most people who found your post endearing probably didn't reach out and tell you directly.
Enjoy your family. Kids are such an incredible joy.
Federico
maybe Kai has revenge bedtime procrastination too
"I now think we’ll discover their long-sought ‘boy-friendly teaching methods’ around the same time we finally eliminate the ‘bro culture’ that prevents women from winning exactly 50% of physics Nobels."
I wouldn't be so dismissive about this claim. The average age of physics Nobel laureates over the past five years was 77. People are getting Nobels now for research conducted in the 1970s, back when many Ivy League schools didn't admit women. The "natural rate" of women winning physics Nobels might not be exactly 50%, but of course discrimination is a huge factor. The pool of potential Nobel laureates still includes many women whose careers were impacted by blatant de jure discrimination from decades ago.
I recommend the book goodnight gorilla. It has the moon on almost every page and finding it can be a game. If you take this recommendation, I would also like to know from a bonafide moon expert which page has the best moon.
I was at a library in japan and saw a giant board book section. Like 3ft by 2ft books. One of the books was papa please get the moon for me. Familiar with the title and pop up mechanism I excitedly called my kids over to go through it. It did not disappoint.
There’s a very nice moon pic as a payoff in “Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear?” Altogether a cozy book.
I had this happen to me. My five year old threw a temper tantrum because I went to the store without taking her. She had the windows open and was shouting out the window. And my next door neighbors called the cops, those assholes.
When potty training I would sing: "Pee, all that you can pee, make some water, in the po-o-o-ty!"
I think I know the exact Jonah song. I have a lot of reliably obnoxious songs I learned at Vacation Bible School I can break out if I need an obnoxious song for some reason.
> pills aren’t food and you shouldn’t eat them
I think toddlers must be programmed to learn from adults what to eat and what not to eat. But maybe in a way that's a bad match for pills, eg "put everything in your mouth and see what happens" or "copy what adults do"
With our kid, "I'm hungry!" at 7:57 every damn night has mostly resolved. Not through any successful strategy on our part, just by him turning 7. I know this sucks to hear right now, 7 - 2 is a horrifyingly large number.
(We also came to the conclusion that our kid will not in fact cry it out. He will cry until he's shaking in terror at having been abandoned. Cry it out was the absolute worst advice for our kid, still regret trying it. But it worked like a charm for our friend's kid -- they barely had to do anything. So we just snuggle in bed every night until he's well asleep, and now we think "get the snugs while they last, some day he'll be a teenager and he won't want this.")
Good luck.
Children in dangerous environments (like, say, the Savannah before we had weapons) learn to be quiet, very very early.
So I don't think toddlers' shouting is evolutionarily motivated.
I am curious as to how many modes toddlers have. Is it just two? Screams at everything, or quiet like a mouse? Or are there intermediaries that are natural equilibria? (Aka: do all toddlers in Japan/France scream at everything?)
From https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/ :
> We both got the same types of cases. We were both practicing the same kinds of therapy. We were both in the same training program, studying under the same teachers. But our experiences were totally different. In particular, all her patients had dramatic emotional meltdowns, and all my patients gave calm and considered analyses of their problems, as if they were lecturing on a particularly boring episode from 19th-century Norwegian history.
> I’m not bragging here. I wish I could get my patients to have dramatic emotional meltdowns. As per the textbooks, there should be a climactic moment where the patient identifies me with their father, then screams at me that I ruined their childhood, then breaks down crying and realizes that she loved her father all along, then ???, and then their depression is cured. I never got that. I tried, I even dropped some hints, like “Maybe this reminds you of your father?” or “Maybe you feel like screaming at me right now?”, but they never took the bait. So I figured the textbooks were misleading, or that this was some kind of super-advanced technique, or that this was among the approximately 100% of things that Freud just pulled out of his ass.
Have you considered that Kai is in cahoots with your professional peers frustrated with your easy way with patients?
I lived under a different curse. I followed the parenting strategy of always providing an explanation for the rules I wanted my children to live under. Whenever I had to deny them something, I would give them a reason, worded at a level they could understand. Unfortunately, this taught them to become rules lawyers--whenever they were denied something, they learned that, if they could challenge my rule, or offer an exception that was worded within my explanation, they often could get what they wanted. Now imagine them as teenagers.
God help me, I can't blame anyone else, I did it to myself.
Unsolicited advice about those 10-minute warnings: make them say it back to you.
You: X minutes then you go to bed
Toddler: ...
You: X minutes and then what?
Toddler: ...
You: X minutes and then what?
Toddler (grudgingly): bed
Boom. Now they know you know they know what's happening. Guaranteed easier job.