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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25656 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Do specific parenting choices really make a difference for how people eventually turn out?

@gog posted a comment fairly deep in the thread about courtesy, which seemed worth discussing further. (https://www.themotte.org/post/812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/176067?context=8#context)

The obvious: misery is bad all on its own, regardless of whether it affects future earnings. So, for instance, Aaron Stark’s childhood was bad (https://youtube.com/watch?v=su4Is-kBGRw) and his parents should feel bad, even though he eventually turned out alright. It sounds like Aella’s childhood was bad and her parents should feel bad (https://aella.substack.com/p/a-disobedience-guide-for-children is not about her childhood specifically, but is the kind of discourse she and others with similar childhoods end up in. FWIW, “my parents are too violent, maybe I should escalate to breaking windows” sounds like an absolutely terrible plan), and it’s debatable whether she turned out alright or not.

Also obvious: It’s possible to prevent children from learning basic things like reading by never reading to them, teaching them, or exposing them to reading culture, not having books at home, not reading or writing oneself, etc, as has been common historically among impoverished households. There seem to be a fair number of children on the margin, who can learn to read just fine with proper instruction and interesting materials, but fall off with poor instruction and boring materials (c.f. Los Angelas whole language program). There also seem to be a fair number of people who will learn to read with just the Bible and an adult who will eventually, somewhat irritably answer their questions.

Contentious: given a certain genetic makeup, family environment, and baseline level of things like nutrition, how much difference do things like daycare, schooling methods, or specific actions make?

Does teaching a child to read at 3 vs 6 matter? Does teaching them algebra at 9 vs 16 matter? Does it only matter under certain circumstances (such as a future mathematician needing to learn math early, or a future world class musician needing to learn to play an instrument early)? Do the children of the sorts of people who like cramming them full of Math and Culture and Literature end up with a richer inner life than if their parents hadn’t had time and energy for that?

I’ve read a lot of fairly surface level articles and reviews about this by people like Scott Alexander, Brand Caplan, and Freddie DeBoer, but mostly forget the details. They tend toward saying that most things work about as well as other things, but some situations are miserable or waste a lot of money and resources, and wasting billions of dollars making people miserable for no reason is probably bad.

I was homeschooled, and am now teaching public school, and sending my daughters to public preschool. Several of my friends are homeschooling or planning to once their kids are old enough, and more are stay at home parents than not, despite being generally lower middle class. I don’t have anything against homeschooling, it just isn’t pragmatic given my personal financial situation and the personalities of my older daughter vs husband and I. This might change as she gets older, she’s still in pre-K, and when I try to teach her something, she tends to argue with me about it.

My general impression on the ground, as it were, with two children and teaching 600 elementary children, is that there is not necessarily any One True Way that will work for every child. And that there are children who are thriving in the large elementary school, and children who are miserable there. Their autism program, especially, seems very stressful for everyone involved, like placing it inside a very large elementary school was probably a bad idea.

Both my daughters seem pretty happy with their publicly funded daycare/pre-K. Two year old is always waving bye to everyone and seems pretty happy to see them. Four year old talks about liking the playground, some friends, and learning to write her name. We bought food from the school cook, and it was quite good. Gog’s preschool did sound pretty unfortunate.

Is there any useful way to systematize any of these observations? Any high leverage changes people are able to make but don’t?

My general impression on the ground, as it were, with two children and teaching 600 elementary children, is that there is not necessarily any One True Way that will work for every child.

Today our teenager’s school was put on lockdown. A few days ago someone claiming to be a student posted on Reddit, anonymously, a specific threat to shoot the school up. Then has been anonymously emailing every night threatening to do it the next day.

Everyone has been on edge.

While our kid was in class today, An announcement came on to enter lockdown, this is not a drill. The school procedure for this is that each classroom door should be locked, shades drawn, and students should huddle up in the part of the room with the least line of sight (fire?) to the outside.

They texted their families while huddled up, shaking from adrenaline but also trying to stay quiet.

It took 45 minutes for the school to give the all clear. It was a false alarm. A rando maintenance person that some staff didn’t recognize was on the grounds and then they lost sight of the guy and escalated.

So.

Home schooling sounds pretty good to me.

The school procedure for this is that each classroom door should be locked, shades drawn, and students should huddle up in the part of the room with the least line of sight (fire?) to the outside.

This is basically "How to emasculate a teenage boy 101", or at least one of the ways to do it without necessarily involving anyone female.

My school does the same; barricade the door, get the students to the corner of the classroom away from the doors and windows.

Maybe a little emasculating, but I'm struggling to think of the alternative. Train the boys to banzai charge the shooter?

Pretty much anything where the boys can assist in their defense would be less emasculating. Prepare to banzai charge the shooter, have them draw rifles from the school armory, have them keep a lookout (which of course implies there's someone they can inform who can do something more)... almost anything is better from a "keep their balls attached" viewpoint than teaching them to cower every time there's a drill or a false alarm.

(I doubt cowering is that great for teenage girls either, but I don't have visceral knowledge of that)

Prepare to banzai charge the shooter

Based, but but lossy.

have them draw rifles from the school armory

I'm madly in favor of arming everyone and their dog, but the obvious problems here seems to me to be IFF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe) and friendly fire. Any solution I can think of - school uniforms, transponders, pass-phrases - would be fairly easy to subvert for a shooter who comes from the same school. It's easier when the shooter is an outsider, of course, but AFAIK that's fairly rare? Maybe by having teachers act as pack leaders and drilling students to only fire on a teacher's command? But teachers, adults that they may be, are probably far from the best people for this job. Now, I still think risking friendly fire is superior to huddling in a corner and waiting for death, but I guess you'd have to make some very good suggestions as to the details in order to make it palatable to parents.

have them keep a lookout (which of course implies there's someone they can inform who can do something more)

Now this sounds eminently feasible.

If I was prowling a school with a gun and they announced "active shooter! all male and male identifying persons are encouraged to form wolfpacks and destroy anyone holding a gun that's isn't a cop. this is not a drill. show no mercy" I'd consider myself done. An entire building full of teenage boys given permission and encouragement to kill you sounds like you have approximately a minute tops before you're beaten thoroughly to a bloody pulp.

Doubt that many parents would want their kid to be one of the 5-10 mowed down before the shooter runs out of ammo, though.

True, but I'm not convinced we should care what they think.

Once, a couple of people flew planes into buildings. Since then, passengers have thwarted 100% of attempted hijackings or suicide bombings at no small risk to themselves. Those kinds of attacks don't happen any more; most fatalities within the last 20 years are evenly split between pilot-as-hijacker (which would have been preventable had the bureaucracies at fault for them accepted the above fact), plane-as-hijacker (737 MAX 8s), or shootdowns.

Then, there was a cultural meme that made some angry men decide to shoot up churches. Since then, church security (formal or informal) has thwarted the vast majority of attempted attacks, generally by shooting the attackers. There was a video of the last attempted one in the US getting summarily executed (or at least there's a photo of the defender, don't remember). Church attacks (in the southern US, at least- risk factors are "living in other areas" and "being the religion most favored by the local authorities") don't really happen any more.

Now, there's another cultural meme suggesting angry men should shoot up schools. We only trust teenagers with guns at school if they bought them explicitly to shoot up the place these days, so obviously the most effective means of defense is impossible, but the message "if you try this, you will fail, die an ignoble death, and the footage of your summary execution [or your being subdued] will be made into shitty memes for years to come" is starting to get out there (the fact that a trans person is the subject of that video probably made it even less cool- but having the lowest-status men on the planet doing either this or the Default Dance right next to you/r body is probably even worse).

Nothing sounds more unbearable than the vision of going into school with an MP5 and 10 30x round magazines ready to get a massive kill count only to score one leg shot before all of the sportsball kids swarm you and beat you senseless with their bare hands. Get some stories like that in the media environment and school shootings become pretty unfulfilling.

This really only has to happen 2 or 3 times before school shootings completely fall out of fashion.

Personally, when I was in high school, I didn’t find these active shooter protocols merely emasculating, but just plain poorly-thought out. If the shooter is able to force his way through the door into the classroom, then he now has a line of sitting ducks to fire at. Far better to set up an ambush: a student or a few standing right beside the door, ready to smash the heaviest object present in the classroom right on the shooter’s head the second he enters, so that he collapses, stunned, and is promptly beaten to a pulp. Even if the ambush corps suffers casualties, it beats the probable massacre that would result if the shooter is able to enter the classroom with all the students neatly lined up for target practice.

Years after graduating high school, I talked about this with some friends, all of whom had attended different high schools around the country, who all said that they independently thought the same thing.

I’m now wondering what the efficacy of this approach would be. There’s gotta be a tactical flaw here somewhere, right?

There’s gotta be a tactical flaw here somewhere, right?

You need to consider that the enemy isn't breaching and clearing- they're usually targeting specific people, then picking off targets of opportunity after that (the penalty for lateness is death and so it's no longer a deterrent). "Get everyone into the classrooms and lock the doors" is good enough and even arguably the best you can do; the reason it's made a whole big thing is purely for political reasons (that's what happens when you don't have an even gender/political distribution in education). There's zero reason to announce a lockdown over PA, just quietly send someone to go make sure the outside doors are closed; if shit is going down, you'll know.

It is still the case that schools are vulnerable to casual attackers just walking in the front door, it is still the case that efficiency in these crimes is not the goal, it is still the case that the countermeasures and drills will do nothing to stop a truly indiscriminate attacker, it is still the case that drilling against that scenario would be even worse (psychologically speaking), and it is still the case that attacks of that nature are incredibly rare.

Last time I received active threat training as a high school teacher, the police officers were responsible for the training, and it was basically: run away, if that seems viable, out of the building, go somewhere safe -- wherever seems safest to you, call and check in later. Otherwise, barricade, throw stuff, there are probably heavy tables, probably books and stuff. It seemed very in line with instinctual responses. It was a pretty small school, though -- possibly a large school would have trampling problems or something?

Yes. It's a pretty outrageous scene.

https://aella.substack.com/p/a-disobedience-guide-for-children

The ideas of Author #1 in there strike me as something that could only possibly have been written in hindsight by someone living in a culture such as the modern Western one where physical violence in childrearing is taboo. It is telling that they did not actually take the window-breaking option at the time: as someone who was actually raised in a spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child culture (RU), contra

So you're 4, or 8, or 12, and you break a window and tell them you'll do it again if they assault you again. They're shocked, this can't happen, the world is awry. They ban you from TV or computer or whatever.

the idea that a real 4- or 10-year-old would choose an extended TV/computer ban over being slapped or belt-whipped strikes me as a preposterous failure to understand the value function of children, and even for a 15-year-old, this is only moderated by 15-year-olds' greater capacity for principled/ego-driven defiance and sourcing other entertainment. I wager that the author confuses the magnitude of their present indignation over having been hit as a child for what they actually felt about it at the time.

It comes off as somewhat delusional. This comment sums it up:

I grew up surrounded by kids in foster care. The one thing I can say with a fair amount of certainty, is that unless your home situation is very bad, you don't want to end up in foster care.

If you have 2 parents with jobs, who care about your academic and musical accomplishments, you're probably doing pretty well, even if they hit you once in a while.

You're gonna get them investigated by CPS, make them lose their job, make them more stressed out or the family poorer by breaking things, for what? So you can be in the care of people who care less and are even more abusive, with fewer resources?

Ideally you'd be able to find a somewhat trustworthy adult like a relative that could take you in, but that's not something a child can easily assess.

Additionally, parents have many non-violent ways of hurting their children if they escalate. Domestic violence charges that will stick to their background checks for years while they're looking for their first job, identity theft to ruin their credit, psych ward commitment...

Even the author concedes that their strategy is only viable if the parents are paper tigers, and TBH I feel like their conception of parents who aren't paper tigers is abstract at best.

What do you do with a parent who is no stranger to breaking their own windows? Or, to get personal, what do you do with a parent who would burn their own house down (It was a shoddily executed attempt at insurance fraud in which we lost far more than the insurance paid us.) and then have the kid drugged for being sad about it (Mom doctor shopped until she found someone willing to diagnose me with OCD.)?

Somehow this escaped me but still, why would a 'paper tiger' hit a kid? Probably because the kid did something wrong. Is it worth jeopardizing the only relationship you have with adults who have your best interests in mind over some moderate violence? Even if there is no significant escalation, parents can always simply give up on the child.

'Oh yes I never dissuaded you from getting into 100k in debt for an art degree because you'd break a window over it, remember?'

'Why did I not discourage you from dating this clearly abusive person? What was I supposed to do, hit you?'

'You got yourself disfigured and sterilized and we did nothing to stop you? Well we thought you were all grown-up all along'

Additionally, parents have many non-violent ways of hurting their children non-violently if they escalate. Domestic violence charges that will stick to their background checks for years while they're looking for their first job, identity theft to ruin their credit, psych ward commitment...

One of the silly and dangerous things about the exchange in Aella's post is that it doesn't distinguish between parental motivations. I suspect, though I can't know, that the parents of authors one and two are disciplining, whether wisely or unwisely, out of love, so those kids really don't have to worry about their parents trying to hurt them this way out of revenge. But kids from worse families who tried their advice could be burned pretty badly.

I have no citations nor will to dig them up (=> what follows is not a high confidence claim) but my gestalt impression of the argument "details of parenting don't matter as long as minimum standards are met" comes from studies that measure parenting and quite generic statistical measures of education, income, or perhaps questionnaires about life satisfaction on 1-5 scale. I can't escape the feeling that there are many details that are substantial to the personal lived experience that are path contingent (including parental choices), but all those dimensions are collapsed into nothing in such studies and look like random noise.

I’ve always suspected such studies are not capturing the tails of the distribution, nor do they want to.

At the 1st and 99th percentiles I expect you would see some stark differences in parenting.

There's no doubt that the lower tail sucks, that's why "as long as minimum standards are met" is there. But there's real question about whether there is an upper tail that makes a difference.

And, you also don't choose to be in the 1st or 99th percentile of parents. You are born there just as much as your kids are. No parent within two standard deviations of the mean could push their child rearing to those extremes.

Pretty much all that I've read about this comes from Bryan Caplan's book "Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids" and based on that I think you're right. A lot of these findings are from twin adoption studies (to control for genetics) so they filter out anyone who's too messed up to be allowed to adopt a child. It's not that parenting doesn't matter at all, but more that it doesn't matter much within the range of things that a normal, middle class person would do. Kids who fall below that standard can definitely get messed up by it. The problem is that a lot of people who aren't in any danger of hurting their kids spend a lot of time worrying about it and being overprotective.

I can't escape the feeling that there are many details that are substantial to the personal lived experience that are path contingent (including parental choices), but all those dimensions are collapsed into nothing in such studies and look like random noise.

This seems likely. There are also backfire effects, which makes it hard to guess what action will have the intended affect, vs sending them in the opposite direction. That especially seems to happen a lot with very strict families in liquid modernity, internet enabled cultures.

I’ve read a lot of fairly surface level articles and reviews about this by people like Scott Alexander, Brand Caplan, and Freddie DeBoer, but mostly forget the details. They tend toward saying that most things work about as well as other things, but some situations are miserable or waste a lot of money and resources, and wasting billions of dollars making people miserable for no reason is probably bad.

They are mostly right. Much of this stuff is vague, indeterminate, or wishy-washy. Smarter kids tends to imply better outcomes regardless of pedological method. At the extremes , parenting matters , specially extreme wealth. trump's kids will turn out fine, or at least have better odds of success compared to kids of average upbringing. I read that one-on-one tutoring helps a lot.

Biden's kids?

them too, but trump's kids stand to inherit at least hundreds of millions, and an entire business empire. Trump is far wealthier than Biden, who has a net worth of only just $10-17 million.

As a new parent with a 3-month old baby, I'd be interested in this too.

My totally unscientific intuition, sort of based on how heritable everything is, is that as long as you don't totally fuck up (feed him, don't keep him locked up in a dark room, have him socialize with other children and adults) it doesn't really matter/whatever an upper-middle class person would naturally do is fine. My wife initially fell victim to tons of the baby gear marketing, but once you realize that your baby is equally happy in the $50 generic amazon swing as he is in the $300 fancy swing, you kind of apply that lesson to child rearing writ large.

It's probably more important for his happiness to make sure he breathes through his nose than it is to play Bach by his crib while he sleeps or put him in one of those Russian math programs. We'll try, as much as possible, to avoid a burnout-inducing, intense middle school/high school, although that's hard where we live because a lot of our neighbors are that type. In my job I see plenty of kids coming out of grueling East Asian-style schooling and it absolutely puts them at a long-term disadvantage.

Hopefully the kid will be interested in something and we can nurture him to go deep in that direction, and hopefully it's as straightforward as just exposing him to a lot of things and seeing what he likes. The main thing I'd be at a loss over what to do is if he was just passionless and wanted to watch esports all day or something because I'm not like that and it'd be hard for me to understand and intervene.

Probably if you are hell-bent on raising a chess prodigy you should teach him chess early but that and related things seem like totally pathological goals to shoot for with your kid.

My wife initially fell victim to tons of the baby gear marketing, but once you realize that your baby is equally happy in the $50 generic amazon swing as he is in the $300 fancy swing, you kind of apply that lesson to child rearing writ large.

It's probably more important for his happiness to make sure he breathes through his nose

Are we the same person?

But after the neighbor boy showed up wearing a LGBTQ pin my wife has gone from a a huge fan of how diverse our local public elementary school (look at all those refugee kids in the playground) to saying we need to gear up to get the kid in the hyper conservative evangelical private school twenty miles away.

Hm? That sounds like the opposite - OP is going to choose cheaper swings; your wife is going to choose fancier school.

Probably should have made it clearer. It's a different train of thought. Wife has gotten over the baby expensive things, but unfortunately is shifting to future expensive things.

In my job I see plenty of kids coming out of grueling East Asian-style schooling and it absolutely puts them at a long-term disadvantage.

That's interesting. The article about S Korea posted here a couple weeks ago seemed to also about this -- a pathological fear of not being the most excellent with the most excellent child leading to millions of people failing to form intimate relationships or have kids at all.

As the parent of a 25 month old it makes them very angry to not breathe through their nose for about the first year! Just a heads up!

Minor quibble: Kids have no real frame of reference, so they are easy to satisfy. Every kid at my daycare except the screaming one-year-old would have said they liked me and the daycare ladies and the food and most of the other kids. One kid (the one who never spoke) tried to refuse to return to the daycare when I quit, though- because she now had a point of comparison.

Main point: Does it matter? Think of watching a movie with a kid and all the jokes and references that the kid doesn't even realize are jokes and references. He doesn't know what he's missing. He might enjoy the movie more than you did, but your experience of the movie was richer/denser. The entire world is like that, all the time, and as you become more culturally educated you realize how many well-credentialed adults are in the same position as the kid watching the movie. Doctors and physicists and professors all the way down to gas-station clerks are missing a huge part of human experience and there is no way to even explain that to them since they don't even realize it's there. So all that wordcel cultural stuff is of limited economic benefit, but it is of extreme personal benefit. And it is a benefit that I want to pass to my kids. But there's too much to absorb to start late, so having a dad like me isn't enough. There needs to be teaching and exposure.

So you learn algebra when you're nine, because algebra is easy- it requires no real experience of the world. And then, when all the other 16-year-olds are learning algebra and how to write a sentence (really), you can start philosophy and literature because now you understand death and fear and maybe love. And you don't have to start by learning to read archaic English because you've been reading archaic stuff since you were 7 even though it didn't matter and you can engage the material because you aren't just stepping into the cultural conversation cold- you've been sitting at the grown-ups' table, silent and listening, since you were 10. And when everyone else is taking out student loans to go get an ersatz "The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Feminism" liberal arts education, you already have one at least as good as what they will get, probably better, and you can now study something that pays because you need money but you also need a lot more than that.

So I'd say it matters very much.

I can second everything in this comment. My upbringing was like the one you mentioned, and people frequently think given that I keep talking about the Greeks and Romans and use Big Words etc. that I must have studied philosophy or something humanities/liberal arts like that when in reality I did Pure Mathematics and leveraged my learning there to get into quant finance where I make pretty decent money.

In my case I still needed to do a large amount of catching up on the liberal arts stuff during and after my degree just because there is so much out there. Indeed this catching up is going on to this day, I'm currently going through the (absoutely excellent) art history course on Khan Academy, which although being extremely "liberal" and "progressive" tinged is still extremely useful and informative as I know from my metis of the structure of the world what is actually important and I should care about and what is merely progressive "kissing the ring" and can be safely discarded.

I could very well see someone who doesn't have a good bullshit detector falling for the progressive worldview which is heavily implied and softly pushed by the teachers behind the course but if you know the pitfalls you can avoid them pretty easily and get a solid and relatively deep understanding of not just Western art, but the artistic history of the whole world, all for free.

Kids have no real frame of reference, so they are easy to satisfy.

Of course they do. Their own home, mostly.

Think of watching a movie with a kid and all the jokes and references that the kid doesn't even realize are jokes and references.

Yeah, I was homeschooled in a conservative community, so I have a lot of experience with not understanding references. It isn't really that big a deal? Or, rather, we get to choose which references we get vs not, based on how we spend our time. I now understand a lot of culture war references from spending time here. Bravo, me. Very rich.

So you learn algebra when you're nine, because algebra is easy

Lol. Your daughter is smart at math. Congratulations. But don't belittle the majority with passing dismissive remarks.

And then, when all the other 16-year-olds are learning algebra and how to write a sentence (really), you can start philosophy and literature because now you understand death and fear and maybe love. And you don't have to start by learning to read archaic English because you've been reading archaic stuff since you were 7 even though it didn't matter and you can engage the material because you aren't just stepping into the cultural conversation cold- you've been sitting at the grown-ups' table, silent and listening, since you were 10.

And you feel very self-satisfied about this. It bolsters your self image as a very good and cultured person, who deserves a good life and family and job. You start a Substack. It is a nice hobby. You belong to a very pleasant book club. Is it a better hobby than joining a sports team? How would one know?

And when everyone else is taking out student loans to go get an ersatz "The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Feminism" liberal arts education, you already have one at least as good as what they will get, probably better, and you can now study something that pays because you need money but you also need a lot more than that.

Or you go to a Great Books college and engage in a perpetual book club for several years, then work at a grocery store for a while to be near your community, then teach for a bit, notice that algebra is not easy for everyone, marry and raise children, spend time at the park with the children, unschool them while feeling a bit lonely. Are still a nice person to have in the book club, but can't come for a decade or so, on account of the children.

This is all fine. I've lived like this, and have no problem with it. But it's unclear that one child seeks out Dostoyevsky and another basketball primarily on account of education or conscious choices, vs personality and proclivities.

Are you basing this on actual people you know? If so, how old are they? I come from a "read Les Miserables in second grade" kind of family, and it's fine. I have nothing against it. But am not sure it's important, based on the fact that I spend my free time on Internet forums, full of rich references and people complaining about Moloch (a multi-level reference!) eating everything.

So you learn algebra when you're nine, because algebra is easy- it requires no real experience of the world. And then, when all the other 16-year-olds are learning algebra and how to write a sentence (really), you can start philosophy and literature because now you understand death and fear and maybe love. And you don't have to start by learning to read archaic English because you've been reading archaic stuff since you were 7 even though it didn't matter and you can engage the material because you aren't just stepping into the cultural conversation cold- you've been sitting at the grown-ups' table, silent and listening, since you were 10.

but IQ is doing much of the work, no, not the parenting? There is so much information for free online and elsewhere, as well as scholarships, that bright kids should not be deprived too much by not having top-tier parenting. Maybe 50-100 years ago it was like this, but tech has leveled playing field a lot.

IQ lets you use the info, but it doesn't make you prefer it to video games. Parenting removes the possibility of video games.

You seem to be assuming that kids will know to find all the resources on their own, and generally do the executive function things a parent would likely be much better at. Parental encouragement, purchase of supplies (robot, pencils), and setting up the house comfortably for the hobbies (desks, quiet space) all matter greatly on top of what you can get by googling "learn to code"

It seems like part of the problem with the Caplan take, is that people imagine wildly different parameters for the parental Overton window.

Parents will obviously buy pencils. The few children so deprived they don't even get pencils from home are given them at school (along with paper, snacks, and some other things).

Most parents can and will get desks and a lower end robot, keyboard, hard drive, or whatever. This is especially true if the kid is credibly using it for educational purposes. Some parents also have better connections, more money, more home space, and time to take the kid to clubs, but this seems in some sense intrinsic -- most parents won't be able to change these things just by wanting to.

A quiet space can be surprisingly hard! Maybe the kid should go to the library?

A year and a half ago Scott wrote an ACX post about why his writing had changed from the way it was 2013–2016, and it prompted me to think about the kinds of pieces I would rather read from wizened psychiatrist Scott rather than young buck Scott. One of these is his current thoughts on shared environment and the effects of parenting. Another is the state of social science research on spanking; that would give him a chance to apply his thoughts on shared environment, and it’s culture-war-adjacent enough to examine the effects of bias but outside the current focus of the culture war.

Aella’s descriptions of her own childhood make for somber but thought-provoking reading. As an evangelical Christian, though not a parent, I wonder what went wrong to produce the kind of abuse she went through. One possibility: maybe evangelical parenting advice is particularly difficult for parents on the autism spectrum to apply. Aella has described herself and her father (but not her mother) as on the spectrum. Evangelical advice focuses pretty heavily on responding to the child’s heart and will. Young children especially wear their hearts on their sleeves, but if you struggle to notice emotional cues you may miss the point where you have been severe enough to discipline effectively and you may see obstinance where there is none.

It’s also interesting that, in spite of all that, Aella writes positively about her homeschooling experiences and negatively about her brief time in public school.

A year and a half ago Scott wrote an ACX post about why his writing had changed from the way it was 2013–2016, and it prompted me to think about the kinds of pieces I would rather read from wizened psychiatrist Scott rather than young buck Scott. One of these is his current thoughts on shared environment and the effects of parenting.

I hope he does revisit this. Now that he has children of his own, something along these lines might be on his mind. He wrote very negatively about his own experiences attending a fairly good public high school. I wonder what alternatives he would consider if his own children experience something similar.

I've spent a lot of time in conservative Christian homeschooling circles, and encountered families similar to Aella's, though it didn't necessarily come out until years or even decades later, and some I haven't kept in touch, so I still don't know how things really were. It seems like there are families who fall into a feedback loop of thinking they should be the Best, Most Righteous family, so they decide to adopt some disabled children from another country and homeschool them, despite not really having the right personality for this, and then get super worked up when the children turn out to not also be the best and most grateful, who will know how much personal space they need and when, despite so much expense, effort and sacrifice. Or they go become missionaries in Africa and bring their families, then get super worked up about their wife (who is on malaria medication while homeschooling multiple small children) not being the Best and Shiniest. St John in Jane Eyre somewhat captures this. Very intense, very smart, rather interesting -- much too intense to have small children around all day every day. The homeschooling part probably goes better when the father is the more intense parent, ad the mother is going along with it out of belief.

Large public schools do seem like pretty awful places for children with autism as well -- very loud all the time, bright artificial lights, no privacy, very few choices, very strict schedules, lots of transitions through bright, loud hallways every day. I can see how she wouldn't like that either.

I find it impossible to believe that early teaching doesn’t matter. If you look at top chess players and instrument players, there’s clearly an association between top performance and age of practice onset. You see the same thing with language accent development, psychomotor skills…

Any high leverage changes people are able to make but don’t

Create contingent rewards for every hard or boring desired behavior, and make most enjoyable and novel experiences be contingent rewards upon a desired behavior. I saw my cousin trying to get her kid to talk about what she’s doing (she was roaming around and looking at different stuff etc what kids do), and her strategy was to incessantly annoy the kid by asking questions when the kid is busy. This is dumb: not only is there no motive to use difficult cognitive abilities to explain to mommy everything that she’s doing, but the contingent reward (novel exploration) increased by ignoring mommy’s yapping; in fact, the child is learning how to more efficiently ignore her mother’s speech because it thwarts her pursuit of reward. A much better strategy would be to have the child explain what she intends to do and after doing this provide fun novel things to play with, then increase as needed for skill development. Or even something like, “I have another fun thing over here, but first I want you to explain what you’re currently doing.” Or create a game where things/compliments are provided according to task-explanation. Etc etc. Everything is mediated by contingent rewards.

I find it impossible to believe that early teaching doesn’t matter. If you look at top chess players and instrument players, there’s clearly an association between top performance and age of practice onset. You see the same thing with language accent development, psychomotor skills…

It matter initially but later on this is surpassed by innate things like talent and or individual interests . how many people are still doing piano after taking lessons at 10 years old? or going from youth soccer to adult soccer? Consider high-stakes math competitions or admissions: parents and kids alike cram for those, but IQ determines in the end who wins and gets the benefit.

Re: math competitions, I think that’s because real life success requires a ton of soft skills that are neglected from too much deliberate practice (emotional and social intelligence, simple physical endurance, self-motivated planning…). But that doesn’t mean that early life practice isn’t essential for skill development. The top four chess players all started around the age of 5. This is normal for chess grandmasters despite most chess players beginning later in life. There is nothing unique to chess for why this would be, as it’s just visual-spatial pattern matching and longterm memory.

My parents homeschooled several of my siblings (but not me). My sisters homeschool their children. It's all mostly unschooling. And the kids /adult so far have developed completely comparably with (occasional knowledge gaps here and there). My son is in school, but can do mathematical laps around his cousins a few years older than him. He didn't learn that in school, he's just precocious mathematically. I honestly think schooling mostly doesn't have a large variance on the average in terms of well-rounded development. It can have differences in social development and on the margins of any specific subject. The more you focus on outcomes based on subject matter, or social grease, the more I think schooling will have an observable statistical effect. The more you look at broad variance of human development, the less, imho

The more you focus on outcomes based on subject matter, or social grease, the more I think schooling will have an observable statistical effect.

That seems likely.

I thought I was bad at math until my mid-twenties, because I hadn't ever taken a decent math class, and it's plausible I wouldn't have gone int a more math/science based field if I had taken some good algebra and trig classes earlier (but ultimately been in the same social class, with a similar income). Meanwhile, I had to learn a lot of social norms in college that I could have learned in Jr High (but maybe more painfully?).

I still expect to be able to teach my children my own area of expertise just fine on weekends and summers if they're interested in learning.

I honestly don't know how to feel about that little story in Aella's Substack. First off, there's no definition of "my parents were violent" other than "they hit me". So was that smacking/slapping, or was that punching with a fist? Leaving marks?

Then Author #1 is too glib about 'how it all would have gone'. Asking to be referred to the foster system? Even as a bluff, that means they had no fucking clue what that would be like in reality, and if they were the 'good child' doing well in school and winning music competitions, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess they had no problems about having clothes to wear, enough food, or heat in the house, etc.

Which is not to say that outwardly respectable nice middle-class families can't be violent and abusive! But I do wonder what the real situation was. Maybe the parents were violent, or maybe Author #1 (and siblings) did have psychological problems they don't admit, or blame on their parents, or brood too much over "I was abused" when what they mean was "When I wanted something and my parents didn't give it to me, I pitched a fit, and they gave me corporal punishment because that's how they were raised".

I don't know. But the more I read, the less I believe the parents were "violent" and "beat/hit" that person.

Go to their workplace, tap a glass until you have everyone's attention, and tell them all that your parent assaulted you last night, and could everyone please tell them not to attack children. A lot of people would want to avoid the shame of that occurring again.

And then Dad stands up, apologises, and says "Well you can see for yourself what Junior is like; last night he refused to do chores and back-answered his mother, so I swatted his backside. That was the 'assault', folks". And everyone in the workplace thinks he didn't hit you half enough if you're pulling this self-dramatising shit. Seriously, a genuinely violent parent is going to drag you out of there, beat the living crap out of you for pulling a stunt like that, and you end up in the hospital. Somebody really living in fear of violence is not going to recommend 'strategies' like this, except as part of wish-fulfilment revenge fantasy daydreams of "I'll show them!"

I generally don’t endorse lying, but giving yourself a physical injury to blame on your parents at as evidence might be a viable strategy here, might embarrass your parents more, and is something that’s hard for them to physically prevent you doing to yourself.

This is also fucking terrible advice, I thought Aella was supposed to be smart? Now you're labelled as self-harming, which does make you the 'problem child', and you are revealed to be a liar trying to get your parents into trouble. You'll have a psychiatric label slapped on you, be dosed up to the gills on medication to stop you doing anything like that again, and may well end up in the foster care system anyway, plus everyone will feel sorry for your parents and the terrible kid who tried to persuade everyone they were abusing them by faking an injury. What kind of lame-brained notion is this?

Now you're labelled as self-harming, which does make you the 'problem child', and you are revealed to be a liar trying to get your parents into trouble.

I do not interpret this as her suggesting something as stupid as claiming razer cuts on the wrist as evidence of parental abuse. I would imagine it's something like giving yourself a black eye or the odd bruise, which is both easy to do, and practically impossible to conclusively dismiss as fabricated.

As both a general practice doctor or a psychiatrist, I would almost never dismiss such evidence out of hand as a lie (and it almost never is). If you really want to get your parents in deep shit, that is easy enough. It would take a lot of inconsistency and other subtle tells before anyone would start getting suspicious.

Which is not the same as me claiming this is a good idea, but it is not as retarded as you think it sounds.

I think "giving yourself a black eye" is harder than it might appear, and there are the good old excuses for it: he walked into a door, he got into a fight, he plays sports and so on:

One woman told us her son injured himself when he slipped on water while dancing in the kitchen. “I rushed him to the emergency room when he got hurt. The doctors asked me questions, and I told them everything.” She was shocked to learn they reported her to child protective services for suspected abuse, triggering a cascade of interventions that she said deeply harmed her children and damaged their relationship.

In the absence of any other markers of abuse (no other marks, scars; no previous visits to hospital or doctor; appears adequately clean, fed and clothed; nothing from the school about absences, injuries, etc.) would a "he said/they said" be taken seriously? Seriously enough to warrant "Oh my goodness, this poor little child is being ABUSED, this warrants TAKING HIM INTO CARE"? Instances such as these ones indicate that social services are just as overworked, and police and courts not involved until too late, as in the UK and elsewhere.

A case from 2022.

Years of failure in Pennsylvania.

Taking kids away is racism and classism.

Really abusive parents are not going to take you to the doctor or the hospital for a black eye or some bruises or scrapes. So you'd have to injure yourself, call the police or an ambulance, and sell your story. And if your parents are otherwise ordinary, normal people, they'll be defending themselves and probably believed. But if it worked and the kid was taken into the foster care system, they might regret it:

Children – myself included – who are housed in congregate facilities face isolating, prison-like conditions that include severe limitations on privacy and bathroom use, poor food quality and inadequate medical care – particularly mental health care – all while feeling lonely, unsafe and unloved.

From the sounds of it, Author #1 is going by this definition of abuse:

The police might not take an assault that leaves no marks seriously, might tell you not to call again about normal parental assault (call again anyway), but it'll be very embarrassing and memorable for the assaulter.

So what he's calling "parental assault" is what ordinary people would call smacking or slapping. Then he goes into the traumatic range of punishments the vile abusers might levy against you:

Of course there's a few things they can actually do, like withhold money or computer access or internet or transport, and that'll hurt (maybe immensely) in the short term. (Though, they're afraid to use all of their real options, because then they'd have no more leverage at all.) But eventually it'll be months since they last hit you, and they want to be a happy family again.

Oh no, no computer access? The horror! How about "you break a window, they send you to bed without any supper"? That is, you go hungry. And the more you act out, the hungrier you go, because if you're going to behave like a wild animal, you'll be treated like a wild animal. How about "okay, you got the cops and the courts involved? we're washing our hands of you, you think you're so grown-up then you can look after yourself" and they kick you out of the house?

This guy is plainly brooding over what he considers to be assault and abuse, but I have no idea if he was really badly treated, or if it's just "my mom gave me a few licks of the wooden spoon" behaviour.

"Which is not the same as me claiming this is a good idea, but it is not as retarded as you think it sounds."

I think I'm a lot more cynical over how this would work out in reality because of a job in local government where we interacted with social housing clients, and there were cases of kids living in conditions you wouldn't keep a dog in, but we hadn't the power to intervene, the cops could do nothing, it was all in the hands of the social workers handling the cases and they were firmly brainwashed into "don't break up families" and "it's not our job to be judgemental".

So a middle-class kid who is clean, nourished, clothed, gets on well at school (see his little list of evidence to back up 'I'm not a problem child') hits himself in the face to mark himself up, then calls the cops to complain he's being abused. They arrive at the house, it's a normal-looking home, there isn't dirt, squalor, feral dogs, scruffy half-starved kids. Junior busts out the prepared speech:

"I know that the law doesn't take child assault seriously, but I will do whatever it takes to be safe in my home. I am not a problem child. Here's my most recent report card, see how my teachers all love me, here's the phone number for the school, call and ask if I'm ever in trouble. This isn't about a personality disorder, this is about child assault."

The parents deny all this and say he did it to himself. I think it's more likely to go that the cops think "this is some smart-ass kid trying to get attention" and leave, and if they do write it up, there will be a note on the record about 'lil' troublemaker, wasted our time trying to get his parents arrested for making him do his chores' which will bite you in the backside later, instead of the fairy story of 'and everyone clapped and believed me, the hero':

The police report may help protect you from any institutionalized problem child stuff your parents try later.

The police report is evidence you are a problem child who made false accusations and wasted time, genius.

Yeah, I also find myself incredibly cynical over this having been raised by a parent who was not, as Aella's article put it, a "paper tiger".

My youngest (half) sister actually went through a process something like this when our mother and her father divorced. He hired a tough talking idiot of a lawyer and proceeded to sue for custody based on allegations of child abuse (I wasn't told about this before they went through with it because they mistakenly assumed that I would side with my mother. I wouldn't have, but I would have told them that they were embarking on something very dangerous and foolish in the name of assuaging my stepfather's ego over getting screwed in the divorce. Mother didn't give a shit where my sister stayed as long as the child support and alimony checks kept coming in.).

Long story short, being intimately familiar with our mother's character I have every reason to believe my sister's accusations, but they were thin on physical evidence and in my opinion argued the case completely wrong. My sister was arrested as a runaway and then returned to our mother's custody, at which point my mother called her father on sister's phone, told him he would never find her, and chucked the phone out the window going about 70 miles an hour down the road. There was a struggle over the phone during which my sister was punched in the face, but it didn't land directly so there weren't any dramatic bruises for me to take nice pictures of. I got called in by our mother when little sister allegedly started threatening to kill herself (I have no clue whether to believe that or not.).

I got her out of there the next day and talked to his lawyer, a CPS case worker, and so on.

Mother hired a better lawyer (One would think that my stepfather would have learned something from mother running circles around my father in court for 15 years, but apparently not.), said lawyer successfully derailed my sisters' attempts at testimony (I wasn't there because it was supposed to be a preliminary hearing, not the actual custody trial.), and the judge told my sisters to their faces that he didn't believe them, dismissing the whole thing as some variety of teenage drama.

There was no heroic validation for my sisters, no revenge upon our mother, and in fact all they accomplished was putting my sister in actual danger.

To end, I'll just say this. There's never going to be any imposition of justice upon our mother. The only thing to be done is to try to live well and remember that once you're out it is you who is the author of your life story and you who can be your own worst enemy.

Our mother is now in her mid 50s, alone, and living on disability. She is clueless as to why her daughters want next to nothing to do with her. This isn't some grand act of karma, it just sucks.

Yeah, I thought it really odd and unconvincing, though I do know some people from very conservative families who should have just frickin' sent their kids to public school instead of turning their home into a powder keg. Not that anyone other than a trusted religious leader would have been able to convince them of that. At least one ended up on Aella's "the only thing I have going for me is being a young woman, guess I'll do prostitution until I can figure out something better" track, and found it pretty traumatic. My impression is that if she had tried the breaking windows and embarrassing her father in public route, she would have ended up getting belted, then possibly tied up in a windowless room until they were sure she wouldn't hurt their stuff.

My impression is that if she had tried the breaking windows and embarrassing her father in public route, she would have ended up getting belted, then possibly tied up in a windowless room until they were sure she wouldn't hurt their stuff.

From reading her post about her father, absolutely that kind of behaviour would have gone very badly for her. He would have no problem escalating, and he would have used this kind of action as more evidence to berate her: "normal people don't do that! I told you that you were a crazy, useless, worthless bitch!"

Someone who can confidently advise "A four year old can break windows, just break a couple windows and your parents will be too embarrassed to ever hit you again" has no freakin' idea what genuine physical abuse is like. Just try reading the Victoria Climbié story and imagine how "break the window" would have gone over. At least Aella isn't the one telling people "you should have tried this, I wish I had tried this".

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