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Interesting. My upbringing was basically the opposite. I was told by my parents (and culture more generally), that if I saw someone doing X to achieve goal Y and I really truly believed that instead of X it would be better to do Y it was my duty to let them know this and the fact that this was unsolicited means nothing.
Imagine you see someone trying to open one of those child lock medicine bottles where you have to push them in first, wrangle the cap around a bit and then twist to open them. However they don't seem to know this and you've noticed them for a while trying to twist the cap and open it and it keeps on failing, and they don't know why. They haven't asked you for help but anyone can see they are clearly frustrated. Pretty much nobody would say it's a bad thing to go and tell them how to open the cap, even though technically it is unsolicited advice. We just take this concept and scale it up to apply to many more things.
Now whether they choose to follow my advice or not is completely up to them, and I shouldn't try to change what they do, but my duty is to let them know and what they do with this knowledge later is purely for themselves to decide. On the Day of Judgement I will be able to say before God that I did what was required of me at that point in my life to help my fellow man and thus I was indemnified from whatever happened to that person afterwards, e.g. if they were swimming in waters I knew to be shark infested I have a duty to tell them they should get out ASAP, if they don't and then get eaten I am not morally responsible for what happened in a way I would be if I saw them swimming there and just went on with my day giving them no warning.
I guess this is yet another example of the cultural differences between the west and my homeland. It's pretty small on its own but when you have many dozens of such things they add up very quickly.
You say: Don't give unsolicited advice.
We say: It's your duty to give unsolicited advice.
Overstepping definitely exists and there are lots of ways in which it happens, one way I mentioned above was e.g. trying to get people to actually follow the advice you gave them, thiis is looked down upon quite hard.
Using an example from your own culture (Machiavelli's The Prince):
It's more that the advisors aren't seen by the advisee as knowing their personal situation better than they do, the advisor is just saying what they feel is best for you (the fact that they give up their own time to even give you the advice in the first place is a small act showing they care, it's cheaper for them to save their own time and say nothing) from what they are able to see. Like the artist in the valley looking at the mountain, they may be able to see something about you that you have overlooked, even though you have a far better idea of the exact details of the situation.
There is minimal expectation for the person being given the advice to follow it, and people often freely ignore the advice they have been given by randoms (because of course, the random doesn't know much about you, you might be doing X because X' is unfeasible for some other reason they don't know but you do, so when they tell you to try X' you thank them for their advice and continue doing X),
Equally this isn't seen as insulting towards the random person who's advice you just decided to ignore because everyone knows and acknowledges that you have more information about the situation at hand than the person giving you advice. Note that this is often even true in the case of solicited advice, that too is often freely ignored by the person who asked for the advice in the first place because it doesn't work for them and isn't seen as something particularly bad by the culture beyond a slightly higher expectation that you will follow the advice because you were the one asking for it in the first place.
Going to 50 different people, asking for and getting their advice and then ignoring everyone's suggestions is definitely looked down upon, it's perfectly possible for the first 3 people that they gave you bad advice, but it's far far more statistically likely that if you don't take the advice of 50 different people the problem is with you rather than them. On the other hand ignoring 50 people who gave you unsolicited advice is seen as far less bad, because all 50 of them might not have seen the reason why X' is unfeasible for you.
I personally try to at least give a small justification for why the advice they gave me wouldn't work when I'm put in such a situation, and then other person, their duty discharged, goes on with his day. Repeatedly pestering the same person multiple times with advice on the same thing they don't take is most definitely seen as overstepping though, and looked down on, generally it's fine to give 1 piece of advice, maybe 2 if you really know the person well and like them, before moving on with your life, more is seen as excessive but of course the closer you are to the person you are giving advice to the more you can do here.
Interestingly financial advice is the one type of advice I do not give to anyone, not even those close to me. This is because if the advice doesn't work out they will blame you, while if the advice does work out they won't thank you in anywhere near a proportion to how much they would have blamed you in the counterfactual. "Buy index funds and don't touch them" is where I leave it at (incidentially this is also how I invest my own money).
And of course, certain things really are beyond the pale, telling people "you should have at least 4 kids" is not gonna fly unless you're their parent or grandparent or your argument is so high level that it would apply to basically everyone (in which case it isn't personal advice any more). Interestingly though far more people can get away with "you should have at least 2.2 kids", probably because the argument behind giving the latter advice does not rely on much specific factors about the person you are giving the advice to, so it really doesn't matter you don't know them well at all. I have been told multiple times I should donate my sperm to a sperm bank though, completely out of the blue...
This to me is crazy, maybe complaining about the mother-in-law is somewhat justifiable but if you believe you yourself turned out alright and had a decent childhood then your mother has a certified track record in raising children which means you should probably listen to what she has to say (same with mother in law, your chose your partner so you probably think they turned out alright, hence your mother in law has a certified track record as well). What makes you think that you, on your own, can do better than them? They are your elders, they have earned the right to give advice on raising children by successfully doing the same themselves. Lack of filial piety is another major issue I have with the western way of life.
And then these very same women who don't trust their elders will happily leave their offspring with daycares and nurseries for hours each day to be raised by randoms for whom you have minimal idea of their suitability to raise children beyond passing some government mandated training courses that teach god knows what.
I can understand this sentiment when you're raising your 5th child and have the fresh memory of dealing with 4 children while the knowledge from your elders is more dated, but doing this for your first child is madness (I assume most of these letters come from first time mothers or the like, mostly because there are a lot more of them than 5th time mothers and also because by child 5 your mother/in-laws probably won't still be offering advice as you've documented to them already that you can handle things).
When I end up having children my plans are to leave them for a while with either my or my wife's parents precisely for these reasons over throwing them into daycare, it's cheaper and very likely better, plus having a young child around the house again will light up the lives of its grandparents.
I agree with some of what you say, but that's very charitable to your in-group and very uncharitable to your out-group. I could just as easily cite "The Nurture Assumption", reference things like people having fucked up parents, and that people turned out all right in spite of their parents. Or maybe they turned out poorly even though their parents were decent people.
What's wrong with this? You frame it in a very negative way, but millions of kids in the US go to daycare. Is it really that bad? For the most part, I think people should figure out what's best for them and pursue it.
I worked at pretty mid-tier daycare in Canada. It was bad.
The studies that show daycare is good for child development use highly curated daycares, with like 1:4 adult-to-child ratios. These studies actually simulate a mom staying home with her kids. MY daycare was a charity daycare run by a church, so to help single mothers, they took everyone. I worked with the 3-year-olds, and the worst ratio was 1:21 (illegal). A normal day was 1:12. In either case, the kids were supervised, I guess, but the priorities were no fingers in power outlets, no vomit, no urine, etc. Learning to count or something was a complete impossibility.
-The kids could talk, but it was garbled and they couldn't tell you what they had done the night before. Conversation was difficult, so their language development was definitely stunted. A child psychologist once told me that language abilities develop most in early childhood- if that's true, daycare damaged these kids' brains. I would meet kids who stayed home with their moms and those kids would tell me what WOULD HAVE happened if something the night before had turned out differently.
-One kid in the one-year-old room cried LITERALLY all day, 8-5, for about her first month. The metabolic stress alone must have affected her, and the noise and tension affected the other kids.
-One kid didn't talk for the 5 months I worked with her. Not word to me or anyone else.
-The one-year-old room was a pen. The kids sat on the ground with toys pretty much all day. The ratio was better, but the workers were occupied with diapers and feeding most of the time, so interaction was limited.
-About 8 kids (out of around 50) were at the daycare from 7 am to 5 pm. A little kid sleeps about 12 hours, so that leaves either 2 hours with their parents or sleep deprivation. Both of those are bad for kids.
-Since the kid spends the majority of his waking life at the daycare, the workers are raising him. I thought I needed resume padding for teachers' college (incorrect), but the other workers were low-IQ, 5th-generation underclass hillbillies under the stress of just being in a room with so many feral kids, let alone trying to manage them. Since middle-aged women generally don't like the cold, and Canada is cold, the kids spent very little time outside.
I am now a highschool teacher, and while I am certain that intelligence is fixed and genetic, I am confident that IQ depends on nurture. Exposure to puzzles and vocabulary and general knowledge and grammar are extremely important. It takes years and years to acquire that stuff and you can't speedrun it when you realize that it's missing. My kid is 9 and just finished Algebra 1 on Khan Academy. I don't know how that compares to actual school algebra in the US, but in Canada that's pretty good (she can't rotate shapes to save her life though, so that's 1 point for the nature crowd). At this rate she's going to have math powers. She has extreme reading powers. It is possible, and some even say probable, that she will not be able/interested enough to spin that into some high-paying job, and she might turn out a bored housewife or HR-lady-that-none-of-the-other-HR-ladies-like-because-they-think-that-she-thinks-she's-better-than-they-are, and the Nurture Assumption crowd will say "See, Gog? Similar outcomes to other women with parents like you."
But quite apart from money, or propensity to addiction and crime, how do you think her model/experience of the world differs from that of one of the kids who went to that daycare, and which model/experience would you prefer your child to have? What sorts of questions will she wonder about, compared to the daycare kids? How will she experience movies and music and advertising? How many more topics of conversation will she be able to discuss? How much more will she bring to the romance table? None of that just develops because of genetics. Daycare is bad.
Two things
The de facto early childhood narrative around COVID is that we've ruined the educational and social development of 2 - 5 year olds (roughly) because of the lockdowns and lack of return to school. Genuinely curious (I have no horse in the race): does your daycare experience lead you to doubt that or not?
I have an overwhelming fascination with teachers' (at any level before university) perspectives on intelligence, personality, and social development. Please write your own top level post!
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This is interesting, and might be worth its own thread.
My understanding of the research is that people were surprised by the results, because they're not intuitive, based on things like observing kids in daycare vs home and extrapolating, though I've mostly forgotten the details.
Wait, what? Isn't IQ just the indicator of intelligence that we're able to measure?
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