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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've met lots of people who were fucked up, and lots of people who claimed that being fucked up was a result of childhood, and particularly of parenting. But also lots of people who were fucked up because of things that happened to them as adults: divorces, family deaths, wars, etc.
And I've known people with equally fucked up childhoods, equally awful divorces, equally upsetting family deaths, equally violent wartime experiences...who were fine upstanding well-adjusted citizens.
If it only impacts some people and not others, if poor parenting quality is at best one factor that might or might not lead to an outcome that can be arrived at without poor parenting quality, then we have to question whether parenting quality is really important at all, n'est pas?
Moreover, for all the pro-natalists around here, especially those thinking about the conscientious upper middle class, a nationwide cultural push to get people to chill the fuck out about parenting may be the very best thing we can do to improve birth rates.
No, it impacts some people in ways you can see and not others. There's a pretty big difference.
I mean, yes, most people with fucked up childhoods had fucked up childhoods because their parents needed anger management class/alcoholics anonymous/whatever. Ordinary middle class people need to chill out about thinking they're going to traumatize their kid. But it's not all the child's genes. It's not hard to find people who were traumatized by step-dads or whatever after normal and well adjusted dad got rammed by a drunk driver, and who are really affected by this.
Could you clarify this? Because it sounds very much like saying that the position is right but unprovable, that parenting is important but leaves no tangible and measurable evidence of its importance. But I'm sure that's not your point.
It's also not hard to find people whose I Coulda Been a Contenda speech involves truly absurd turns of chance, or people who live similarly negative lives for no discernible reason at all. It's not hard to find people traumatized by birth dad. It's not hard whose birth dad was a very nice guy, a devout guy at 7am mass every morning, who still wound up all fucked up and addicted messes. Kids' sexual ethics are one of the classic realms of parental obsession; I can name as many liberals' kids who turned into prudes as I can examples of the proverbial Catholic schoolgirl gone wild.
Anecdote isn't data, and where there is so much noise in all the actual results, it seems like we should step back on the importance of parenting overall, beyond the basics that we can really point to positives on, and virtue-ethics points that don't rely on their effectiveness to justify themselves. Feed your kids nutritious food, get them a basic education, encourage their interests, supervise them enough to make sure they don't kill themselves, take them to Church long enough for them to pick up a basic sense of religion, teach them a work ethic, then hope they pick up the baton and keep running.
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