Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I'm interested in pushing the boundaries of what I can do in order to give my kid(s) a leg up in the future that may not be typical, strictly legal, or within the overton window of parenting.
The typical parenting strategies I already "get" and have plans for. Read early, go beyond school, foster the development of valuable hobbies and life skills, blah blah blah. My parents did a pretty good job IMO so I'm just really taking their formula and tweaking it.
I'm looking to optimize intelligence, SMV, athletic ability, and independence. Examples of things I'm considering but haven't done much research or fact-finding on:
Providing HGH at the optimal times to support height and muscle development.
Figuring out ways to accumulate wealth they can eventually access and avoid taxes.
Ways to give them maximum freedom of movement/flexible citizenship.
Ensuring they're guided away from porn/blue-pill sexuality guidance and (ideally) start off with more information on TECHNIQUE than I did. I think they'll figure this out themselves but I'm struggling to figure out how to do it without a profoundly weird conversation.
Put another way, I'm willing to take on risk to maximize long-term benefit for them, at what I think is a higher rate than the baseline parent. Off-the-wall thoughts and criticisms appreciated.
Force them to do things - many ppl I know had upper middle class upbringings but never experienced things like their parents throwing parties and them helping, regular weekend activities like going to church etc. This helps indirectly but should benefit long term.
Languages and stuff that are harder to learn later
Have multiple kids so you dont pin your hopes on 1 or 2 kids. I think 3+ adds enough variance
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Criticism, here. As a parent of two boys and a great admirer of many of those who post here, I feel compelled to try and ward you off the baser suggestions here involving unethical behavior designed to fast-track your kids. Unless you want to teach them by example that ethics/morality are simply tools to be either used for a purpose or discarded if they create an obstacle or moment of tedium.
I teach, as it happens, and I'm more and more aware of a need to generally guard my online identity so I won't go into detail, but when I catch students cheating one of my first thoughts is: Who raised you to do this? And I am not (quite) naive enough to think adults don't also cheat, in school, at work, in sports, wherever. A lot. And I am always disappointed.
Maybe, as someone here has written, it's true that all of university is "signaling." To me that seems a pretty juvenile take. And even if it's true, so what? There is, or I think there should be, such a thing as personal integrity, and that's something that can only be modelled, not taught.
My sobs (sons, that's a typo I will leave) are still young, preteen and new teen. The difficult, rebellious years are still ahead of us. And technology is no great friend to the conscientious parent. So I suppose they're works in progress and I don't even have the usual personal examples to offer up as evidence. And if you believe Pinker, peers seem to have more influence on kids' character-molding than parents' anyway.
Which leads to my ine bit if advice: Be aware of peer groups. And I don't mean that you ought rate them by social class or networking potential in later life when Becka is starting ballet lessons or applying to Vassar. Or whether they're of the right socioeconomic caliber. My own best friend of nearly 50 years came feom rough family, started in the military right out of high school, became a cop, and is now a welder, firmly situated in the working class. But he has raised a family, owns two homes, and is of such solid moral character and loyalty as a friend that I would die with him and for him if it came to it (or at least this is my conviction, who knows how I would react if we did, in fact, have to face the dragon together). And I suppose I can thank my parents for not chasing him off as an undesirable when we were kids. Maybe they saw something in him. Or maybe I got lucky.
There's no conclusion to this. I typed it with my phone with difficulty. Another voice, anyway.
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Leg up? Get your children to prestigious schools, where they meet children of rich and powerful and possibly befriend them.
This - connections, knowing people who know people - is the sauce for success. This is what prestigious education is about, this is what people are paying for.
Pursuing the best education is not untypical, but knowing what exactly makes prestigious schools the best is definitely untypical, most normies still feel it is about knowledge and learning.
All other things you named are optional.
Look at rich and powerful people - are they handsome and good looking? are they strong and athletic? are they learned and knowledgeable? No, because they do not have to be.
Ah but see there's the disconnect. I don't care about rich - I care about wealthy-enough-to-never-worry. I don't care about power over other people, just power over self.
Of course being a billionaire with a Jet is perhaps the ultimate version of this, but I don't believe in setting low probability goals or those that select for sociopathy. Each generation of my family has improved its lot significantly. I'm looking to continue that progress and give it an upper hand, not shoot for world domination.
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My criticism is that your post reads like your ultimate priority is ensuring your kids can accumulate as much status as humanly possible. There are aspects of this that are reasonable to care about, as a parent: keeping them out of poverty, crime, or damaging social dysfunction. But what's the point of maximizing returns beyond that? You say you've gone through the usual parenting strategies, which presumably takes care of the essentials -- why is ensuring your kids develop good character not the natural priority then?
To be frank, the reason I skipped over a lot of non-status elements is because I really feel like I have those covered.
I'm not a piece of shit, my wife definitely isn't, and almost nobody in our extended family is either. From a moral/good character perspective I just feel like we have that on lock and would have to fuck up royally to have things go any differently.
Even with these status maximization techniques there's going to have to be lessons with them. As an example, I've always been very good with women, but that's worthless if you're destructive to the people you're fucking/having relationships with. The bar should be that everyone views you as a net positive in their life, even if there's a little pain or wistfulness when things don't work out.
You can be an amazing athlete at school or what have you, but you'll 100% regret treating anyone in your peer group badly or being a bully. There's no reason for it.
I could go on but basically I think it's sort of boring table-stakes that should be expected out of a functional parent.
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Selecting their friend group is probably one of the more important things. No idea how to do that though.
Most children and teenagers have no idea how to dress and groom themselves. Lookism is everywhere. Ergo, make sure that they look good. If they want to be cyber-goth and you can't stop them, at least make sure that they dress as good-looking cyber-goth.
Also make sure that they exercise. As in, they have a fitness program and measure progress.
Both of these require you to act the example, but you already do that, right?
In their teenage years, you want them to have good references for their college applications and for job searches: Find a good friend who runs a company. Pay them under the table to hire you kid to a prestigious position for their age, and provide glowing references when asked.
This is pretty far down the line, but there's been discussions in rationalist circles about "speedrunning" collage, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/yqtwit/speedrunning_high_school_and_college/
I think the benefits of this are pretty clear, even though most commentators seem to be against it for IMO bad reasons: If you finish college one year faster, it's one less year of being stuck in an institution and one year extra of prime-life freedom. Also, finishing college one year early looks very good on your CV.
Setting your children up for this should be pretty easy. Get an idea of if they want to go into higher education and if so: what school and field a few years in advance.
Find the course material and start working trough it (easier if you homeschool).
Give them permission to do this weird thing: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
Help them make a plan for their university years. What courses go which year? Should they aim to finish as fast as possible with the lowest possible passable grades, or should they strive for a certain GPA?
Hire them a private tutor (it's weird how few university students do this, the gains are enormous)
For the unethical part: help them cheat. Help them write their papers etc. Collage is only signaling anyway.
I've considered a ton of this!
Agreed on Dress Well, this is something I agree with that I came to far too late in life. Sucks cause my parents tried to help out. In terms of exercise and fitness, I did/do OK on this but could be better.
In terms of speed running college, I'm super into points 1-4. I'm down to help my kids cheat in high school because the material is so worthless and such a waste of time, but there wasn't a whole lot of collegiate course work that was worth throwing away.
One challenge I'd find is that I absolutely loved college, more than my first couple years out of it. Perhaps the deal could be that if they finish in 3 they can hang out and audit classes with their buddies/make money tutoring.
Cheating in college may still be worth it even if the material is worth learning. Writing a thesis is a pain, you don't learn much from the constant re-editing and messing with LaTeX. Having some help on that is useful. And there might be a single course your stuck on (happens to the best).
I didn't love university much, but I can see the point of doing it at normal pace if you enjoy it. I've still have a hard time seeing how 5 years of college trumps 4 years of 25% more college + 1 year doing whatever you want.
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Seconding homeschooling. If you can teach them the Art of Problem Solving curriculum, awesome. If not, you might get some mileage out of it yourself.
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How do you plan on preventing your son from developing a video game or porn addiction or your daughter from scrolling TikTok for 4 hours before she goes to bed? Internet/phone overuse is a major failure mode for kids fucking up their future potential nowadays.
Im no parent, but I think everything you can possibly do will have to be done before they turn 13 and their peer group turns into their whole world.
I just think far too much is outside of your control.
I don't think I can stop it. There's the balance of enabling them to have social experiences with their peer group but trying to restrict what I think is most destructive. However, I've got a couple ideas:
There's a ton of routers that enable MAC address blocking, and "quiet times" and there's basic parental controls for smartphones. I think dumphones until as long as possible.
I'm also considering allowing the kids to play older school single player video games and letting them "unlock" eras as they complete them. 2 birds here - there's a lot of history and excellent experiences they'd miss otherwise, and this will get them a bit of the itch scratched without being
I'm less pessimistic here. I think there's a valley of parental influence after 13, but it ticks back up later on. I see that in not just myself, but a lot of other people I've known.
I don't know about you or your kids, but if your kids are even remotely disagreeable this will backfire spectacularly.
There would be little worse than your kids telling their peers "oh my dad doesn't let me play those games and watch those movies".
I am very disagreeable, and whenever my parents used to try things like this with me, I would usually try to do it anyways, or tip the scales less in their favor somewhere else.
I'd classify myself as pretty disagreeable. My relationship with my parents was horrible from 13-21 because of it. The story I always tell is getting a PS1 3 months after the PS2 came out and I wasn't allowed on the internet on my own computer till 15.
Things were still so different then - you physically had to go to someone's house to LAN to do great multiplayer so that was still so much more social than how gaming works now.
It may end up blowing up in my face. I think a little bleeding-edge modernity would be OK in moderation. I've had someone else on this forum challenge me for giving my toddler fruit juice every once in a while which I really don't understand. I like having a cup of cranberry twice a week, and I don't know if I'd have the heart to say "You won't get to play VR shooters at all until you're 21!" They just won't be able to do it till 3am all weekend.
Ok, so what else are they going to be doing until 3 AM all weekend? "Hanging out with friends" isn't actually a bad default option; you'll have to provide something they want to get up for that's sufficiently early to keep them from that default state.
I've observed that parents can get into this fascinating mode-lock where one's child effectively stops aging at around 13, and aren't capable of recognizing them as older until they're married. I'm almost certain that's because 13-14 is the age one's biological clock says "you're a grown wo/man, and you need to leave the nest now!"; most pre-industrial societies had/have adult initiation rituals around this age for that reason, Judaism's being the most prominent surviving example (and this was also the way it worked in Western society until approximately the end of WW2- most of the Silent generation only had education up to grade 8-10 for a good reason).
Remember, optimizing for independence means you're optimizing for the ability of your kid to not only tell you "no, I know better", but expecting to have the ability to actually follow through (even if the decision is, indeed, objectively bad). "I'm going to get a summer job" necessarily implies "because I want stuff you won't buy me, and I expect to use my property the way I want, which is also the reason all my friends have them".
And you can either tolerate that... or you can't, but you can't also claim to "be optimizing for independence" in the same breath.
(And god forbid you ever tell them that's what you're optimizing for, or even imply it with your actions, when you're trying to deny them independence they know their friends have, because if you do that they'll absolutely give that line right back to you; and it's worse as they'll be in the right so you'll go "ugh why can't they be act like they used to, clearly
they're on their periodit's raging hormones", etc.)Might as well get them the "I thought I wanted this, but it turns out it's not worth it, therefore I'll think harder about it next time" trait while they still have help picking up the pieces/the benefit of no significant problems later, rather than going full rumspringa the minute they leave the safety net like college students are infamous for doing (partially for that reason).
I 100% understand where you're coming from. A job is a great example - I'll make the tradeoff of them learning to work in exchange for them being able to afford shitty fast food and a couple grams of weed.
Trying to limit access to porn until they're old enough to at least hear my speeches about what's good and bad isn't killing my ability to foster self-sufficiency. At the end of the day, parenting really is constantly testing risk/reward for asserting control over kids. I was allowed to make some pretty massive mistakes that I learned from, and that's still going to be the play overall.
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My hot take on this for optimizing: Americans have it backwards, the old school Victorian aristocrats had it right. Send them away to boarding school from 13-18, bring them back to live at home 18-marriage.
My parents would have had it way better if I'd been living somewhere else during my shitty annoying teenage years, and I was much better and more around the house useful at 18. And I had the capability at 18 to get into much more interesting trouble, I needed guidance then not at 13! It wasn't the time to set me loose with no supervision!
I couldn't have done all that much worse in high school anyway, and I think being away from my family might have helped me be less of a piece of shit teenager.
I was actually sent to a (far away) boarding school almost exactly in that age bracket. In my opinion it did not actually help our relationship with my parents much as we kept fighting as much as we used to in the 1-2 years prior, but this time over the phone and during vacations. But maybe this was still preferable to what would have happened if I stayed home, as I was an extremely disagreeable teenager and my parents weren't great at reasoning with me either.
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That is good advice.
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A lot of success comes from your network and how well you can leverage it. So increasing how social your kids are will help. Get them involved in many activities. If you can get them in events where they'll rub elbows with people above their social class, that would probably help a lot.
You also need to socialize your kids with people older than them, particularly adults. I've noticed a lot of young people seem to have been confined to the 'kids table' throughout their lives (and I don't just mean at big holiday meals, but in any situation where adults are present). And there seems to be no point at which they transition to sitting with adults beyond their age; they are always relegated to their peer group. This goes on until they graduate college, and suddenly they are thrust into the real world, and they are basically socially inept at communicating with their elders. Then they self-segregate, gravitating towards people their age, and miss out on opportunities.
Seconding this, and to turn it to another direction for @yofuckreddit , the best thing you can do to min-max for your kid is to be successful yourself. Have the networks where when your kid needs a job/loan/college acceptance/date/advice from an eminent person/institution he won't be some schmuck off the street, he'll be yofuckreddit's boy, from the very respected fuckreddit family. That will get your child much further than HGH.
A great family name is much better than game. A library named after you will get you into a much better school than 50 points on your SAT, and it will get you special attention from a professor that might make your career. Tons of great business successes start with family contacts, just having local people that will pick up the phone when you call or vouch for you to someone else is a huge leg up. And having rich friends is wealth you can access any time you need it, and is extraordinarily hard to take away from you, at a floor it can be a job or a bed in the pool house when you need it.
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Employ them in your own business and have them contribute most of their earnings to an IRA, 1-3 extra compundings makes those contributions enormous. You can't contribute to an IRA without earned income though. For example in 45 years 10000 turns into roughly 250,000 at 7% cagr. In 60 years it turns into more like 700,000.
Teach them how to cook nothing fancy just enough they won't be scared to read a new recipe and make it.
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I would strongly advise against messing about with substances, because they're easy to fuck up and turn into massive side effects that derail your entire plan. However, a better diet can probably add a few inches; if you can get your kid eating liver on a regular basis, for example, it's likely that they'll get a bit taller and higher IQ in adulthood.
It's pretty well documented, I believe, how far ahead of their peers bright and well motivated kids can get if they're homeschooled. Obviously if you have kids you're wanting to be well ahead of their peers, public school(and the Catholic school system, as well) is going to be more interested in encouraging conformity with the rest of their class than in bringing them as far as they'll go, unless you manage to get them into a gifted and talented program.
In terms of freedom of movement/flexible citizenship, finding a way to get dual citizenship with the US/schengen area is probably option #1. If you're American and can't manage dual citizenship with a Schengen country, dual citizenship with Mexico(or another hispanic latin american country) will bring them a substantial part of the way there; Spain has special rules for immigration if you hold a passport issued by one of their former colonies. I'm unsure of if Portugal and Brazil have the same arrangement.
I agree with this. Unfortunately, my spouse isn't onboard. She went to Catholic school. If I'm being honest, I also don't think that she's got much of a teaching bone.
I suppose I don't see how this would be feasible if I'm the sole breadwinner and I'm also trying to make headway in things like high quality networking and creating inheritable status. I'm doing well on those, but I really only have the opportunity to take my kids working out with me and helping with yard work - I can't be running classes too.
So then your best option would be either a gifted and talented program or pulling them from school after they’ve passed a GED to go through the community college system(in Texas, at least, there are special programs for this that allow kids who do this to also earn a high school diploma. Not sure about other states.)
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Huh. I'd never heard of this before (or of any substantial nutritional effect on height other than from calories and calcium, for that matter), but apparently Vitamin A has a decent effect size. On a quick skim it looks like studies are hinting at Vitamin A deficiency being a solvable problem (the effects are seen in poor/malnourished/stunted kids, are seasonal, etc) rather than supernormal Vitamin A levels giving a boost, but maybe a deeper dig would find that too...
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Stimulant prescription for ADHD.
The drugs work even on neurotypical people, not just people with ADHD like me.
I certainly could have used them in calc class, I'll say that much. But I wouldn't advice seeking them until they're in their teens.
My challenge with Adderall was that it was great for studying, but horrible for during a test.
I'd probably want to save it as a weapon until college and have a pretty strict ration - probably 10 doses a semester or something.
It's hilarious how there's still such a stigma against it. A college peer of mine (who's arguably far smarter and motivated) was scandalized when he figured out I'd used it to study for one of our tests and accused me of wrecking the curve. My dad's always said something like "It's speed! Legal speed! Be careful!" despite my brother having a prescription.
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You sound motivated, and HGH administration at critical junctions, combined with nutrition, sound promising. Would you be willing to share your findings with TheMotte in a dedicated post once you figure out a protocol? I'm not aware of any parenting groups, or any community in general, which might discuss this like a redpill PUA forum might when entertaining this sort of heterodoxy. But if you find any I'd like to hear about them.
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