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Scott's most recent post had someone linking to an article in the Atlantic about debunking a study, I went and read it and got sucked into the Atlantic rabbit hole.
Link one: Don't avoid romance says more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past, with some (mostly circumstantial) evidence that the amount of avoidant attachment is increasing. Ends with an exhortation to not be avoidant but doesn't examine the question I would have thought would be of interest, which is why more and more people don't have healthy attachment styles. (Aftereffects of higher divorce rate? Internet usage? Weaker community institutions? Microplastics? I'm just spitballing ideas but wouldn't a marked societal-leve change in people's psychology be something you'd want to investigate the causes of?)
Link two: The Ozempic Flip Flop as someone who gets full very quickly and doesn't have a very strong appetite, I've never really had good mental image of what it's like for normal people with normal appetites let alone obese people with obese appetites. This article in particular presents people who lost weight, noticed immediate massive benefits in their life they're desperate to keep, and yet still can't keep the weight from coming back. It is just the satiety setpoint being set so high it's torture for them to not eat to the point of overeating? I'm trying to match it to my own points of reference for "willpower" struggles but failing. I force myself to go to the gym despite not enjoying exercise, but that's forcing myself to do something, not forcing myself not to do something, so generally speaking once I overcome the activation barrier of inertia the hard part is over. I intermittently (deliberately, as opposed to non-deliberately) fast and can be hungry and craving food but to a pretty easily overcome extent. But what makes someone — who for months now has been eating much less — be unable to maintain the amount they've been eating for months but instead be compelled to keep eating more even though it's actively physically hurting them (and costing them in other ways, like socially). How much stronger incentive can you get? It makes me feel like at some level for some people food is an addictive substance like drugs. (And also still trying to understand how this gets spread — is it really hyperpalatable foods? Something else? We can watch countries become more obese... Whatever the underlying thing that makes someone susceptible to this is, it does appear to be something a country can acquire)
I’ve long suspected that early daycare and full day preschool is at least partially driving the change in attachment. Thinking about it from an evolutionary perspective, in the very early stages of development, a baby needs to fully attach to his parents. The baby needs to know that his needs will be consistently met by parents who are always close by and who care about him/her. Modern parents basically have kids that they only see after work and on weekends (after the 8 weeks of maternity leave). Most actual child care is done by low paid hourly workers who might have 7-10 other kids in their care. The child thus often finds that he needs or wants attention and to attach but the adults around him don’t have the ability to give one kid their undivided attention. So the kid can’t learn to fully trust an adult and fully attach to them.
Is a kid at daycare really getting any less attention than the twelfth kid on the farm? At least in my experience, parents give up on providing much individualized attention after kid three.
Older siblings give lots of attention, though.
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I worked at a daycare for one glorious year. Kids a little less than a year old were dropped off at 7 and picked up at 5. One kid screamed for the entire duration, every day, for months. The other kids just screamed for a week. The attendants cuddled the babies, but they mostly left them on the floor to crawl around. By the time they graduated to the 2-year-old room, the kids were merely supervised, rather than attended to. This was a budget daycare, but not unusually so. The 12th kid on a farm would get a lot more attention than these babies, certainly until age 2 or so, and it would be maternal or sororal attention, rather than "minimum wage demands that I hold you for 10 minutes every hour). Furthermore, even a baby left alone in the corner of the kitchen while the mother makes johnny cakes (or whatever 12-child farm families eat) is still in its mother's presence. Daycare babies are not.
This is horrible. Putting any child younger than 3 years into such a facility is equivalent to putting them part-time into orphanage. Infants and toddlers do not have emotional regulation to handle that and they need regular skin-to-skin contact with mothers and to lesser degree with fathers. Otherwise they can develop similar symptoms to those of institutionalized children with all the baggage - learned helplessness, closing into their internal world as they know outside help is not coming even after hours of crying etc.
Is there any solid evidence of this psychological damage? A lot of parents, starting from month 6, try to ignore their kids crying, so that they cry less and become less of a burden (they are far more coddled now than they used to be). And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.
There is a difference between "crying because hungry/wet/scared" and "crying because I started and don't know how to stop" and if you're around kids for any length of time you'll pick up on the difference. That being said, I'd hate to be a kid raised under the "at six months ignore the crying" regime because yikes. A small baby is not trying to manipulate its parents, it has few other ways to communicate except through crying.
Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"? The hell? Babies were sharing the bed or at the foot of the bed in a cradle in lower class families, so they were never far away from human contact (see The Reeve's Tale, where a plot point is the deception wrought by moving the baby's cradle from the foot of one bed to another). Now it's a lot more "put the kid in a separate room nowhere near the parents until it cries to be fed" which has got to have an affect.
Your yikes are worth nothing. Your female intuition, less than nothing. Mother’s intuition, female intuition, ancient wisdom and tradition, they all did parenting for thousands of years. One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
Parents now spend far more time with them than they used to. You think parents used to wake up 8 times per night for two years to take care of one baby, plus the dayshift? They had actual work to do. I have a lower class family story: Neighbours of my grandparents who had 8 kids, put alcohol in the babies’ bottles to shut them up because they had to work the fields in the morning.
Hey, I come from a time and place when teething remedies were "some whiskey in the milk". But when you have eight kids, the older kids are doing a lot of the work minding the younger ones. It's the first one or two need the most attention. And it was not commonplace for everyone not wealthy/high status to put their babies into an entire separate room on their own (and the people who did do that, also employed nursemaids and/or nannies to attend to them during the night):
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They also turned some of them into flippered mutants, so let us not act like Science has ever batted 1.000 here. Not the physical sciences, and certainly not the social sciences.
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I’m not sure what precisely this is referring to (global reduction in mortality rate?), but I think if we can take anything away from the last 100 years it’s that progress in the physical sciences doesn’t necessarily (or at all) translate to progress in the social sciences.
I agree that women’s intuition is perhaps not everything it’s ginned up to be, but I would want something pretty good before I discount that intuition to nothing. Especially for the most visceral stuff like ‘do I need to hug the crying baby?’ Which is pretty much directly the result of millions of years of evolution optimising for healthy children and functional families.
More complex stuff may be downstream of bad socialisation and I would put less weight on it.
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Prima facie, this sounds absurd. Does not matter much for what?
Raising a good, happy, productive human. People have been looking for this magical parenting style that explains why Joe is good and Jack Y is bad for centuries, and they haven't found it. It's genetics or it's random.
You at the very least need to disclaim that abuse can have lasting effects, especially extreme one.
And that poor to great parenting has much lesser influence on outcomes than people expect.
It is different claim than "It's genetics or it's random."
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Yeah, take any study for results of children in orphanages vs children in intact families. Putting infants and toddlers into daycare is nothing short of part-time orphanage.
This is only partly true, limited to rationalists trying to raise some supergeniuses. Parenting obviously matters especially in negative way - malnutrition, abuse and other negative effects matter very, very much and can have huge consequences. I'd argue that daycare for infants and toddlers is such a case.
I don't think those underfed, diseased romanian orphans can tell us much about the effect of letting your kids cry. I do agree that extreme malnutrition, physical trauma, lack of hygiene do matter to kids' outcome. I don't think modern daycares are anywhere near that level.
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Tangential, but: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/russian-peasant-life
My dad was born into a peasant family in East Pakistan, better known today as Bangladesh, one of the youngest in 9 siblings. He had a loving family, with immensely strong kin bonds with his older siblings doing their best to look out for the rest, including after they were dispossesed and chased out of their homeland during a genocide.
These Russian peasants sound uniquely dysfunctional. I can assure you that that's probably not representative of child rearing and familial roles for most agricultural communities. I suppose I have to blame vodka for that, or the usual Slavic predisposition towards melancholy.
I would rather blame extensive Russian-specific pathologies and malformed society
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Oh that Ivan; such a kidder.
You get families like that, and they're not confined to Russia. They're trash, dysfunctional, and the kids have little chance to grow up not to be dysfunctional trash themselves given how they're raised, unless someone intervenes at a very young age and takes them out of that environment.
They'll probably still have a ton of problems, but at least they're not being raised like feral dogs.
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Around here (Slovakia), I'm not sure if @georgioz will back me up on this, putting children into daycare before age 4 is seen as wrong and harming the child, as the child needs stability and security, not be taken care of by strangers.
Communists briefly promoted it but it later came to be seen as unwholesome and wrong. I have a relative who was put into daycare from age.. 1.5 I think, or maybe 2 years and it seems she (and rest of family) think it was not a good idea.
Agreed, there is moderate social stigma around putting children younger than 3 years into any facility (as it should be in my opinion). During socialism, there was a program for daycare for children 1-3 years old called jasle - and they still exist, but are generally frown upon. There is also incentive structure put in place where the government provides assistance to stay-at-home mothers up until the child is three years old, which gets cut if the mother returns to work or the child is put into daycare. Preschool is generally accessible only for children three years old or older with some rare exceptions.
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