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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)
I'm enjoying all the content on kids! Feel like I'm learning a lot. (Don't have kids but want them.)
What are some of the most important things you've learned since having kids?
Don't leave very young kids alone in bath tubs that have any amount of water in them.
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I'm not sure. Parenting advice tends to be either vacuous, or too specific to be worth giving out generally.
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Enjoy your free time and hobbies now. You won't have nearly as much with kids.
It may be slightly delusional, but I am confident everyone is just incompetent and I could do parenting in like one fifth of the regular time. Modern parents are like those people who are constantly in credit card debt. Just spend less … time on your kids.
Mothers should stop nursing early. Put the kids in a progressively bigger cage while you do other stuff. Then you let them in the garden, and after that you give them a key so they've reached their last cage-level, and voila, you go to their graduation, fire off a "well done, son/daughter" and you're free.
Fundamentally all the time and money invested in them beyond the absolute basic minimum has no influence on their outcomes. Could even make them worse: neurotic and coddled, or suicidal like koreans from education.
I thought this too, and it's only half true. A bigger cage doesn't fully work. But you can invest in training them to be safe, that's how we learnt. Before they are 3 you can train them like a dog, with positive reinforcement, and predictable and infrequent boundaries. This leads to more fun for everyone since you are trying to get towards things that work for everyone. Learn to ignore whining until they learn to communicate. Watch TV. Multitask effectively. Do what parents to 8 do, but as a parent of 2. Anyway I'm still learning but you can keep you personally and some of your hobbies.
Thanks man, good to know my life would not be over.
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But you've got to do it. We need the next generation of shmucks. Our ancectors did it for us, and they had it way harder. So why can't we cope?
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