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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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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.

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"?

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):

In Edwardian times, for the wealthy and mid-tier classes, a nursery was a suite of rooms at the top of a house, including the night nursery, where the children slept, and a day nursery, where they ate and played, or a combination thereof. The nursery suite would include some bathroom facilities and possibly a small kitchen. The nurse (nanny) and nursemaid (assistant) slept in the suite too, to be within earshot of the sleeping children.

One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.

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.

I don’t know what the flippered mutants are referring to, but it can’t possibly compare to the reduction of infant mortality from 50% to 0.5% in the west (4.3% globally).

You’ve never heard of Thalidomide?

And it’s not about comparing, it’s about Science not being perfect, despite it’s many notable successes.

One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.

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.

And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.

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.

Sure, my statement is implicitly limited to the context of the modern western parenting debate.

I don't think budget daycare is serious abuse, though. That is within that western context where my statement holds and parenting does not matter.

I think this depends on age. I am open to the idea that putting a one-year-old in daycare for 40+ hours a week is, in fact, serious abuse. This long substack post is a good meta-analysis. I am aware of the author's identity and can confirm that you are not reading axe-grinding or filtered evidence like you would in most peer-reviewed social science journals.

Very interesting, thanks. I can feel my stance softening.

Also bothersome. I was gonna sell my 5-minute parenting per day course next to the 6-minutes abs program.

Okay, how do I salvage this. Those daycare kids seem primarily stressed out by having to fight other irrational creatures. Hell is other babies, as they say. My proposal to keep the parenting costs to a minimum: put them in cages.

Is there any solid evidence of this psychological damage?

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.

And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.

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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