Gaashk
9d ago
The first fear is having a child who is not, ah, as fortunate as the preceding three.
I was worried about that with my third as well, since I was around some of the kids who had lost the genetic lottery, and it really sucks. I think the odds of having an unbearably bad condition that isn't detected in early scans, and isn't caused by bad behavior on the mother's part is pretty low, though. (I did not personally get the tests done other than ultrasounds). I'm going on a road trip this week on a busy freeway, which is also not risk free, there are plenty of somewhat small risks that are worth taking.
I don't think I'll have a fourth child, especially since I'm closer to 40. My pregnancies were pretty easy, I was eight months pregnant, starting long road trips in the middle of the night and carrying around my toddler in the summer heat. The births were basically alright. It's both age and finances that would prevent me from having another. We need to be able to both work sooner rather than later, and get our finances in order, our current situation isn't long term sustainable even without an additional car payment for an expanded vehicle.
Gaashk
13d ago
How is it? He’s one of the writers who I like in short form, but get a bit lost in his longer works.
Gaashk
13d ago
The purpose of the beatings is to get the child to behave well, for the parents' values of what constitutes well behaved, without having to constantly fight and renegotiate. In GKGW that's defined by instant, unthinking obedience without negative repercussions rebounding on the trainer. The program is to only do one beating if they get the proper level of deference, so the winning strategy is to go with that (and it sounds like Aella did most of the time, and also relates that to her unusual tastes in drugs).
Inconveniently, that doesn't work all that well on people, or at least the children of the sort of people who defy social norms to homeschool their kids in a weird cult in a time and place where that isn't really done. Also it's bad. There may be people it does work on, though one of the several misjudgments of the program is that unthinking obedience, once achieved, isn't actually valued all that highly in the civilization these kids belong to, anyway. It doesn't even seem to be all that highly valued by the Biblical God (c.f. Jacob wrestling with the angel/God, Abraham bargaining with the angels/God, Jesus sweating blood in the garden, etc), so even from a traditional strict Christian perspective, they're very fringe in not just their methods, but also their aims.
Gaashk
13d ago
Yes, and overly sensitive and socially non-compliant children are a big problem in public schools as well, who have to take them if their parents choose to send them. The staff talk about how it's because nobody is allowed to give any consequences that matter, but Aella's stories, along with other people I've heard from who grew up under the GKGW regimen suggests otherwise -- that there's really no amount of consequences that will prevail over certain very noncompliant personalities. They'll spend four years fighting with their parents about their internet friends and then run away, if necessary. Actually I want a Dostoyevsky novel about Aella's family more than a Tom Wolfe one.
I can't find it right now, but there was a post on Darcy's blog (not an influencer, kind of a small blog) where she was taking her kids to a natural history museum, and was breaking down (an adult, a mother), experiencing PTSD triggers, thinking about how her own mother believed in young earth creationism! So terrible! Very scary! My own mother was also into creationism things, and it was totally fine. Maybe they were wrong. They were probably wrong. But they were nice, and liked to talk about Mount St Helens and the way eyeballs work and whatnot. My theory is that very intense parents, who get all worked up over geologic ages, produce very intense children who get all worked up over all sorts of things, from both nature and nurture sides.
We were in an explicitly Christian homeschool group, and when I was young, my parents would take me to church and related events, weekly park meetups, and other homeschooling and church adjacent things. It was fine, I think. I don't remember too well. I was in Girl Scouts, with mixed results. I wasn't very good friends with the other girls, who went to a Christian school together. I tried attending the school for fifth grade, and dropped out after a semester, because it didn't help my social problems, and the curriculum wasn't anything better than I'd been doing at home. In retrospect, fifth grade is probably a bad time to try out school for the first time. I never tried again, but went to community college starting at 16, and liked it a lot. My husband was in Boy Scouts and had a much better experience, made it up to Eagle Scout level, but isn't sure about it anymore (and was in public school, so probably less socially needy). My parents are both bookish introverts, who did not enjoy public school and made few friends there.
As an autodidact, I had the problem I mentioned of going out into the world and assuming all sorts of things were common knowledge that...weren't. I wonder how avoidable that really is; experts are famous for forgetting that their "jargon" isn't common knowledge, after all. It may be that any good education, no matter where it comes from, will set graduates up for that. Did you have that experience too?
That wasn't much of a problem for me, but I'm closer to the average interests and IQ than, for instance, Jason in the link, and my specialization is novels and art, so all my male friends in college could out-nerd me. Also, I joined the Orthodox Church (literally Byzantine liturgics) at that time, and everyone my age there out-nerded me all the time.
I guess my main experience has been that it's important to go find the little pockets of quirky book people, and move there. I've moved a fair bit in my 20s. There are all these interesting little subcultures, interesting little Great Books colleges, interesting little bookstores that run their own seminars, all sorts of things, and I just had to kind of follow them around. My husband and I are very high in trait Openess, and we've discussed that if the kids are having a lot of trouble in the local environments, we'd probably try moving, perhaps countries, or at least across several states, as close to a first resort. Which has mostly worked for me as an adult, anyway.
Edit: Ha, my mom talks about learning to read at three, by her father "reading the newspaper to her." She was especially unhappy that mandatory bussing (there weren't even black neighborhoods, it was just because that's what the other cities were doing) disrupted her ability to even get decent friendships out of school, or bike there and back herself
Gaashk
14d ago
What are some of the most important things you've learned since having kids?
I'm not sure. Parenting advice tends to be either vacuous, or too specific to be worth giving out generally.
Gaashk
14d ago
I don’t think that’s fair. Who doesn’t value being young and attractive?
Sure.
I don't necessarily think that she's wrong. When four year olds are asked what they want to be, and the boys say firefighter, and the girls say princess, they aren't wrong, even if the boys could literally become firefighters whereas the girls could only metaphorically become princesses.
The karate story is weird. Plenty of parents would be upset and embarrassed if their seven year old walked into a trial karate lesson, saw that the other kids were smaller, and proceeded to throw a tantrum about it, then hide in the bathroom sobbing. That's significantly worse than the average public school kid who's parents spent way less effort instilling discipline into. It's more in line with the public school kids who have behavior action plans in place. It's not too surprising that her parents would be pretty shocked, they must have actually believed in the early obedience regime, or why go to so much trouble? It turns out they were wrong, and would have gotten better a psychological grounding by reading Notes From Underground.
I'm mildly interested in her due to the overlap of Christian homeschooling, which my childhood was adjacent to, and the Bay Area Ratosphere, which I became interested in from Scott's writings. I want one of them to write a social novel, something like Tom Wolfe, about their culture. And there are several fine writers there, but as far as I know they're all bloggers, not novelists. (Unsung excepted, but it's philosophical fantasy more than social observation)
Adding:
“aella is lazy and superficial, because child aella cried after being publicly embarassed”
Something that I find interesting about her stories is their ambiguity. It's unclear whether she was being publicly embarrassed (by her parents enrolling her in a class of much younger children), or if they were doing the normal thing, she would have worked her way out soon enough had she chosen to pursue it, and she just felt embarrassment due to social anxiety or something. I took it as the latter, because she related it to not liking to hit a piñata because the other kids would look at her, not to something most people would find humiliating. The freaking out, crying, begging her parents to let her leave, probably in front of the instructor, and trying to run away does sound very embarrassing, for both her and her parents.
Gaashk
14d ago
When one of my nephews was a kid, they were very sensitive and lacking in confidence, so his parents signed him up for a taekwondo class. And he did like it, and it made a huge difference in coming out of his shell.
That might be one of the strategies that's kind of male coded, and much more likely to work on a boy than a girl. As annoying as it is in adventure stories, there are valid reasons why the male characters go through training that has elements of hazing, and the female characters generally don't. (So I would prefer to have less of the silly "classic adventure story, but now a WOMAN who realizes she's actually great already and doesn't need to be trained all that much" films). Aella really likes being valued more for her innate characteristics than for accomplishments she has to work hard for, and I'm unsurprised she didn't connect with the prospect of working hard at karate to advance swiftly past the toddlers around her. But I guess I'm also unsurprised that her father would be annoyed by that, and want a young Aella training montage instead.
Yeah, that's true. And, indeed, a lot of homeschool moms of daughters, especially, still do a lot of tasks that are sort of like labor -- they'll garden, sew, raise and milk goats, make dairy products, bake, and so on. I suppose Zvi and Scott didn't talk about it because apprenticing children as writers or psychiatrists wouldn't really happen until they're well into their late teens, and able to drive and be independent anyway.
There are plenty of cultures that never had that many free range girls, but did have a lot of obligatory embroidery, lacemaking, and whatnot. There appear to have been respectability arms races in the past with who could make the most elaborate clothing that might have been about as onerous as the current saftyism idleness race.
I do want to go to art markets with my kids when they're a bit older, make crafts, raise eggs and whatnot, especially since we have summers off.
Gaashk
15d ago
Yeah, it seems like it would certainly be desirable both for the kids to have somewhere they want to walk/bike, and to be allowed to do that.
Other countries are much more relaxed about this. Kids in Japan can ride public transport by themselves without a problem. European kids do stay outside in some cases in carriages. It works fine and I think the kids are better and less neurotic for it.
I had heard about that, though some people push back that it works because Japan is full of Japanese people, and a lot of places in Europe have also stopped allowing it lately. Like the the map about the historic childhood ranges near Rotherham.
Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news.
Today it's Zvi, continuing last week's discussion from ACX about free range kids, with a side of Aella's very odd childhood and perspective on allowing children agency.
Zvi, as usual, has dozens of somewhat interesting links, and is worth checking out. A lot of it is related to the issue that reporting parents for potential abuse or neglect is costless and sometimes mandatory, but being investigated imposes fairly high costs, and so even among families that are not especially worried about their kids getting hurt walking to a friend's house or a local store, they might be worried about them being picked up by the police, and that can affect their ability to do things other than stare at screens or bicker with their parents. I have some sympathy for this. When I was growing up, inside the city limits, there weren't any kids I knew or wanted to play with in the immediate neighborhood, or any shops I wanted to go to, and my mother was also a bit worried about getting in trouble with the law, so I mostly played in the yard. But perhaps there would have been, if wandering were more normalized? I asked my parents about this, and they said that when they were younger, they also didn't necessarily have neighborhood friends they wanted to visit, and also mostly played in their own yards and houses, but they could have wandered around more if they'd wanted. That was in the 60s, and I'm not sure it's heading in the same direction as the ratosphere zeitgeist or not. My dad does remember picking up beer for his grandma as a kid, which is also mixed.
My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit. Upper class girls could go for a walk in the garden with their governess. The police probably have an interest in stopping children from forming spontaneous gangs, which the suburban families were seeking to avoid. The not firmly classed rural children (educated, able to become teachers, but not able to enter high society) are represented as roving the countryside a bit (Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald novels), and get into a bit of trouble, but there were only a few families around, and everyone knew who everyone was. My grandmother grew up in such a place, then divorced before it was cool, and taught in the South Pacific. I can't tell if wandering through the heather or prairie a lot is better or worse than reading lots of books and playing in the backyard.
The free range stuff, while it may be important for some people, seems a bit orthogonal to the Everything is Childcare problem (probably more about lack of extended family), since the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?
Anyway, I don't necessarily have a firm conclusion to present, other than that that people are talking about it. @Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)
Gaashk
15d ago
Hi!
As far as I can tell, the biggest thing is that some families do quirky homeschooling because they like that kind of thing, and then maybe their ideology guide what they do for it, what books they read and groups they join, but in general they're just into that kind of thing. Bryan Caplan and David Friedman's families sound like that, my mom was like that, and this generally goes well. If it turns out the child wants a lot more structure or interactions than the parents are providing, or the parents get super stressed over the whole thing, they can find a school and go there, or do some other arrangement. This is interesting and aesthetic. How well it goes depends on both the personalities of the parents, and also the kids. I liked it quite a lot, and especially liked doing a lot of 4-H clubs and reading a lot of books. Sewing club with Jane Austen film watching and tea was lovely. College was fine, but it might be worth having the child take a real math class at some point, most families aren't up to teaching math that well even when they know it, because it's a subject that benefits from extrinsic motivation.
Other families do it for strict religious or ideological reasons, but are not really suited to it, and years later their daughters write blogs about how awful the whole thing was, but they didn't say anything at the time for fear of getting into even worse trouble. Some of my childhood friends have done that. Aella has a lot to say about it. It mostly seems to come down to situations where some super intense ideologically opinionated parents believe that Public School is Bad, and the Homeschooling is more moral, and then go on to subscribe to very specific advice about child rearing that doesn't necessarily work out for the parents or children in question. The can go either way -- intense punishment focused child rearing, or negligent attachment parenting, but with no checks, and taking it too far. It seems to go especially poorly when the children in question were adopted, and do not share a bond from infancy and similar proclivities, though biological children sometimes inherit the same personalities that led to their parents rebelling against the mainstream. Anyway, I do feel quite suspicious when some mother says that they don't necessarily like the process of homeschooling, but are doing it because her husband read some super scary articles about Groomers in the Public Schools, so now it's the Only Moral Way.
We are not currently homeschooling, and don't have any plans to. We do use tablets, though I feel a bit bad about it. Here's an interesting post from Zvi this morning on a related topic. We are very heavily in the Everything is Childcare phase of parenting, even with the public schooling, and I might have different opinions in the future. The child in public school especially really likes organized activities, structure, friends, rainbows, unicorns, and Disney princesses at this point in her life, and I might have a very different experience with another child, or at a different stage.
Gaashk
15d ago
Also, people were bored. Nobody wanted to hear that we had solved everything and we just had to a) wait for laissez faire economic growth to solve all our problems and b) accept that anything which wasn't solving itself just had to be that way. They/we wanted change and adventure. I always think that was a big part of the response to Covid - people were longing for a Big Problem in which we could all Do Our Part.
Yeah, I think this is a big part of the Fourth Turning stuff.
Gaashk
19d ago
Is that a reference? A joke? I don't get references, because I was raised in a homeschool bubble determined to turn us all into 18th Century boomers.
Gaashk
19d ago
It doesn't sound so much bitter as sarcastic. Ah, yes, someone has run the numbers on heavily selected women 20 - 30 vs much less selected men 20 - 40, and found that there are more men. Shocking. Who could have guessed?
Gaashk
19d ago
Yeah, I think most of the state is mostly Democrat because they want to use the oil money for daycare, extra school, extra Medicaid, and whatnot. But not the "LGBTQ for 5 year olds" kind of school, just the "too bad we don't have more high achieving kids here, maybe we can teach the ones we have to read and do math if they just sit in a classroom for more hours" kind. It's not like the sheriffs want to enforce the governor's orders about disallowing guns or wearing masks alone in the desert, so they don't.
Gaashk
19d ago
A SYSTEMIC ISSUE THAT IS EFFECTING EVERYONE IN EVERY COUNTRY SIMULTANEOUSLY
Wait.
America doesn't have enough eligible bachelorettes because it has too many promiscuous fat single moms.
(maybe, I don't have an opinion about that)
But South Korea has even fewer marriages, because their women simply don't want to be wives and mothers, it's worse than just working. Despite the women being much more likely to be thin and simply not bother having sex at all.
So we should... execute the attractive cads, get rid of welfare, and ban dating apps until (looks at South Korea) we are left with a lot of celibate women working in low wage labor?
So you could go farther down the hole. You could ban the women from working even rather sad little jobs outside the home. Then they'll become hot trad wives!
Perhaps we should just have another war at that point and let the men kill each other. The King David solution.
Or bring back subsistence farming, that has a proven track record.
Gaashk
21d ago
I left the Motte for a week, because I felt kind of embarrassed and irritated based on last time I tried posting here, but did want to post on this.
Anyway, yes, it came across as very odd, especially from Caplan. I had more sympathy for Scott, since he did not write a book about how easy raising kids is, has young twins, and comes across as more self deprecating.
Both Scott and Caplan are writers, which is unusually incompatible with small children. I've mentioned before that I really enjoyed Virginia Woolf's take on that in A Room of One's Own -- mothers were almost never writers, even when they were educated for it, since writing (and she was focusing on poetry) takes an unbroken chain of thought through multiple hours of the day. I would be interested to hear more about George MacDonald's writing habits, since he was poor by modern standards, and he and his wife raised eleven children, and he was en unusually excellent writer. All his stories have the characters wandering around among the heather at sunrise, thinking, and I imagine him doing the same. It's probably no coincidence that his best work is in fairy tales, so he probably told them to his children. David Friedman talks about how much more he enjoyed his children once they learned to read. Dickens sounds like he had a pretty tumultuous home life.
I listened to a storyteller a few months ago, who tells stories to rooms full of children at schools, and also publishes books. He said that his process is to tell the stories to the children first, a lot of times, for months and months, maybe dozens of times, see what gets good responses, and then writes it down afterwards. That's my impression of ancient storytellers as well. I knew a priest who told unusually excellent sermons, but almost never wrote them down, but I think his process was similar: he would watch the people in real time, and iterate off of that. Scott doesn't seem to have a process anything like that, as much as I like Unsung and shorts like the one about the Hinge of History, and wish he would write more fables.
There was a passage in The Road to Wigan Pier, as I recall, where Orwell was talking about how the British underclass weren't really educated to be literate, but that when charity workers would come around and offer books and classes they mostly weren't interested, and Orwell thought that was just as well, reading and writing weren't much compatible with the lives they were leading. Which seems reasonably likely. There's a lot of noise about lower than hoped for literacy rates in America, <a href=https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read">where "literacy" is, for instance, understanding and appreciating something like Bleak House, but the hoped for outcomes of that campaign are under discussed. I remember my uncle (who owned multiple businesses, was athletic and had a teacher wife and three children) talking to my dad (who reads Kierkergaard out of personal interest) about not reading books. He didn't like reading books, he liked playing sports and doing business stuff. He was probably functionally illiterate, by the Bleak House test. That might be a perfectly valid strategy, actually! Meanwhile, the kids are in bed, and I'm here writing this, which isn't necessarily an improvement, or any more civilizationally useful, even if I can read Dickens just fine.
Gaashk
27d ago
My husband has done it, and finds it harder than most jobs, emotionally. We buy a lot of half prepared food from Costco. Out house is not clean.
I meant the stay-at-home dad comment to mean more that men don't seem to be particularly unsuited to housekeeping, certainly not to a similar extent that (trads say) women are unsuited for work outside the home.
I suppose. The main problem for stay a dad at home with a young infant and the mother away is that (depending on the baby) they might need a lot of soothing, and breasts are way better soothing implements than bottles or pacifiers, it can be very frustrating for all concerned. The father is unhappy that it's hard to sooth the baby, the baby is unhappy that there are sometimes breasts and sometimes not, and the mother in unhappy because she's either pumping at work or giving up on food snuggle times.
Of the churchgoing families with babies I know, some have stay at home moms, some have the dads at home (but maybe feel a bit shy about it, and won't actually say "stay-at-home-dad"), and some have the mom and dad working complementary shifts (I assume this is hard for rest). All have rather messy houses, none vacuum twice a day and are happy about that. Marie Condo now has a messy house, because cleaning dozens of times a day was not bringing her joy.
I'm still not convinced that their roles are really complementary, and my impression is that it used to be less unequal.
It doesn't necessarily stay complementary once the children are older than three or so, and, yeah, I don't really understand women who aren't homeschooling staying as housewives once their youngest is in elementary school, unless they are literally running a home business. I don't think that stay at home dads of older children is a thing at all, unless they're doing some kind of seasonal or creative work, in which case they would say they're doing that, not cleaning the house.
I do find cleaning a single house as a primary job description to be a bit demeaning, but not looking after very young children or homeschooling.
Gaashk
27d ago
I know some women who are like that as well, and can see the appeal. You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.
Those are mostly creative, social kinds of hobbies that are fun to do with children once they aren't absolute babies. I was homeschooled, and basically did 4-H instead of middle school, so we were always keeping animals, sewing, quilting, making fancy leather projects, and so on. My family uses a wood stove for heat, and we have a dead fruit tree that at some point we need to chop and split for firewood, which we plan to do ourselves. My housemate used to do home-brew stuff, and it looked like fun, I would definitely consider it.
But also, those are things men also participate in, more than cleaning, probably because they're more interesting than cleaning. It's extremely hard to keep things clean in a truly equal house with children, where nobody is extremely conscientious. My parents' house is very bad in that way, but many home crafts have been made there.
Ultimately, even pro-choice women mostly want humanity to continue another generation. So we have a volunteer military, and volunteer motherhood. If people stop volunteering, then that society deserves their slide into irrelevance and possible subjugation that will follow.
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