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