Have you done anything on tablets/edtech in elementary school? Seems like it's taken over a lot of public schools. I'm currently engaging with my school board about it but it's a slow and laborious process...and I think most parents just don't even know how much time their kids are spending on tablets in school. Here's my hotlist of studies/articles talking about the risks of this type of technology in schools but would love to see a Zvi treatment of this topic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yYsvhpO_z_6bnI6QX2pQ_TCbGjeIz39v-inRQlmisk4/edit?usp=sharing
Is there a way to track all the instances where police, CPS, or DCFS are called, and it turns out to be nothing? There's also the Department of Health who can send a social worker to your home if you have a child with lead poisoning (ask me how I know...)
I understand the hesitation to trust governmental entities like the police CPS, many of whom are crazy, evil, or flat out incompetent. The flip side is a world in which even worse horror stories occur regularly. People can be really bad, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Personally, I’d rather deal with an investigation (which I have) than risk children being neglected or abused just so I don't feel under suspicion.
I think you're imagining some sort of society-sized determination of suspicion that they can clear you of in some way, that doesn't exist? How is this going to prevent future suspicion, or your paranoia about potential future suspicion? Usually 'they called CPS on them before' raises rather than lowers these worries, if anything.
And yes, it would be good to have more data, and yes obviously at some probability of actual danger you want to investigate... but there's also a huge danger of them actually acting when they shouldn't, and the results of such threats.
Also, just a huge amount of stress even if it results in nothing - at a bare minimum, it confirms you have a neighbour who is the kind of person to call CPS on you, and if they've done it once they'll do it again!
> > Mason: "Parenting doesn't impact children's outcomes" is an absolutely senseless claim
> It is a deeply silly thing to claim, yet people commonly claim it. I do not care what statistical evidence you cite for it, it is obviously false. Please, just stop.
I think you need stronger arguments. The statistical claims are clear and reproducible. Sure, there are effects from parenting, but then they must affect something not so easily measured. Where is the error?
The statistical claims are that it doesn't significantly impact things like personality or earnings. I think Zvi's point (and others', including myself) is that it absolutely does impact the quality of their life, at least in the same way that any other close relationship does, and usually much more so because of the specific features of the relationship between a child and their parents.
I'm not disagreeing. Parenting influences the parent-child relationship. But the question is still to what degree that is genetic. Not every parent-child combination can express any parenting style. For example, children's personality influence their parents parenting style: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/how-kids-shape-their-parents-parenting-style
I think _this_ "question" isn't about whether anything "is genetic", or even about 'parenting style'. It's about remembering, as a parent, to give your children lives that are positive/good/happy/satisfying/joyful/exciting/beautiful/meaningful/etc., independent (but not regardless) of, e.g. the expected value of your actions to provide that on their future earnings or education credentials received.
If this question is reminding parents to remember to give their children good/... lives, then this is an environment effect. I agree that it is a good idea to remind parents of this because a) it might have a positive effect and b) the environment has a significant effect on parenting style (and I'm herewith part of this effect and strengthening it).
But the parent itself might not have this effect, e.g., because they may be unlikely to go against their natural parenting inclinations themselves.
My favorite example of this is Bryan Caplan, with his "parenting doesn't matter" book and also homeschooling all of his kids. Regardless of whether you can thread the needle to make those positions consistent (e.g., most parenting doesn't matter, but my extra special parenting does), the juxtaposition is hilarious.
I have five kids and have known about the issue of parenting presumably having little effect for a long time, so I had to make up my mind about it. My opinion is this:
* the kid's brain is (mostly) not going to throw away useful information about the world, thus proving an environment where the kid can experiment and learn useful stuff about the world (physical, logical, social) is probably a net good, so when in doubt about parenting choose by that criteria.
* parents have little influence on the long-term personality of the child
* parents' parenting style (modulo their kid's being-parented style) is probably largely genetic and you are not going to go much against your inclinations anyway (whether you rationalize a bad style or "choose" a good one)
* but it is probably possible to ruin things, e.g., if you are taking the "parenting doesn't matter" too literally and stop your natural parenting style in favor of neglect.
* do things that work for you and the kid (kind of tautological)
I generally agree, but also think people wildly overestimate the importance of parenting and wildly underestimate the importance of modeling the behavior you want your kids to learn, especially when they are super young.
(not directed at you, just generally): They're watching you, WAY close than you think. WAY younger than you think. You can't teach kids hardly anything, but good lord will they learn from you. How do you argue? How do you treat randos? What do you do when you smash a finger? When you're pissed off? When you're pissed on (hey, it's gonna happen)?
Ok, the obvious and hard stuff aside. Do you (again, the general you):
1. Model lifelong learning? Education is important (parents say), but are you learning new things and failing/improving at them where your kids can see?
2. Fix stuff or throw it out? Lot of people think we live in a consumerist/wasteful society and that we shouldn't throw so much stuff out so easily. Great! You ever live this?
3. Volunteer, especially when you and your kid have "better" stuff to do? How often does your kid come with you while you volunteer?
4. Live responsible alcohol consumption (or total abstinence as the philosophy may be)? I think this is one thing that sinks in way earlier/deeper/faster than someone would ever realize. My wife certainly is the model of her Dad on this and I'm much closer to the model of my parents.
5. Respect nature? Pick up trash? Go out of your way to improve wildlife habitat?
6. Swear inappropriately? Camp talk belongs at camp, not in the dining room.
I'm not saying you need to try and become a monk or a saint (a terrible fit for me personally), but long before "teaching" is on the table they're pretty much set in their ways as far as the basic subroutines of how you approach things/react.
His view is that parenting doesn't matter in the sense that it won't make one's kids different people, but homeschooling is better, e.g. more enjoyable and satisfying, for them compared to the alternative of sending them to school.
Re car seats we just ordered a Ride Safer vest and an optimistic it will make car trips markedly better. Certified down to 22 pounds, no hard seat or cushion or anything. Fitting 3 kids side by side is a major use case but we only have one and I’m mostly excited to take regular taxis again
Regarding "Parenting doesn't impact children's outcomes," my recollection of Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is that he's very careful to say that parenting obviously matters, it's just that once a child has something like a typical western upbringing, you can't find a statistical impact beyond that
Yes, there's no statistical impact on things like personality or earnings, but there absolutely is an impact on the quality of their life, particularly when they're living with their parent(s) or their more-direct dependent, i.e. is the relationship and that time in their lives positive or negative for them, regardless of any permanent or long-term changes to anything else.
To my understanding, that leans very heavily on the "controlling for other factors" where other factors includes parental income, careers, education, and other traits that highly correlate with what most of us would call "good parenting."
No one is very surprised when the children of unemployed drug addicts become unemployed drug addicts. Or when wealthy doctors have children that become wealthy professionals. I feel like these studies see correlation and make the jump to saying that parenting *isn't* a cause, where that's the crux of the question. How much of that future success is something like genetics and how much really is good parenting, which also gets passed down through the generations?
My recollection of the adoption studies, though I'm hardly an expert, is that biological children of unemployed drug addicts don't do very well even when raised by wealthy doctors, and children of wealthy doctors tend to go on to be wealthy professionals even when raised by decidedly middle class families ("poor but culturally middle class" is about the lowest SEC that *can* adopt kids, so it's the lower end of the data set)
Re: car seats, I do it with infant - now toddler - seat and two cheap high back boosters that aren't the heavy type. Upgrading to the toddler seat made it worse, at least reacting rear, even with collapsible cup holders.
If there existed a booster without arm rests, it would be easier.
Also, we used a belt buckle extender for the middle seat.
Further, we tried this with the infant seat in a little two door hatchback and it was doable but it sucked, and not doable with the toddler convertible seat.
Once you have 3 the extra row of seats is a huge boon for car pooling alone, but our budget isn't there for that yet.
I’ve successfully done three-across in a small hatchback. (Two forward and one rear-facing in the middle.)
And we currently have three-across in the back of our mini van, since we have five kids. Definitely a pain to install but once they’re in, they’re in — so at least it’s not an ongoing hassle.
We did it by choosing car seats that are designed for three-across and that work from infant through booster stage. (Diono Radian 3r 3-in-1).
I’ve found it to be more difficult to include a booster in the mix because it’s hard for the kid in the booster to buckle themselves when there’s barely any space between the seats.
Fortunately the car seats we use work well in five-point harness mode even for kids who are getting pretty big. We have two who are about to reach the legal no-booster-needed age and we still have them in the five-point harness to avoid the booster-buckling issue.
Switching to the mini-van did not have a big financial impact for us personally because we got it used for $2,000. We value frugality/having lots of kids over the look of our car — the engine is solid but it has a ton of cosmetic damage. We got a bumper sticker to put on the back that says “my other car is a maxed-out 401k” 😏
Re: norms in public. I don't even subscribe to them but I adjust my parenting to meet the most stringent of norms when in public... well to a degree at least. Ask before offering snacks, get involved if my kid is involved in an altercation when the other parent decided to unnecessarily intervene, have my kids take turns (that one I actually believe in) and be mindful of others. I didn't make them wear masks on playgrounds though.
But yeah there are things you have to be aggressively not judgemental about, including approaches to breastfeeding on both ends of the Overton window ("why should I go through the inconvenience of even trying if there's formula", vs "breastfeed til 5"), gentle parenting approaches, a few others.
It is helpful to exchange parent information online but the norms are strong and get stringently enforced. Topics that are very stringent are safe sleep and car seat safety. Also leaving kids unattended.
Not a response to anything written here, but are any other New Yorkers concerned about childhood exposure to PM2.5 iron dust in the subway? Several studies have shown that the average underground subway platform has a PM2.5 AQI over 200 with the main element being iron. AQI over 200 is considered "hazardous", especially for children, and the concentration is almost 10× WHO recommended 24-hour maximums, but on the other hand (1) our children are not generally spending 24 hours in the subway, and (2) almost all the research on PM2.5 exposure has focused on carbon particles, not iron, so nobody really knows the effect of this. The source of the pollution is I think generally understood to be brake dust from the friction brakes used on the subway.
This seems like the sort of thing this community might know or think about so I thought I would ask here. I could imagine it turning out to be a "nothing" and also could imagine it turning out to be as bad as lead paint.
I would be interested in a deep dive on the evidence of harms for low levels of air pollution. We know that high levels are really bad, but, when you get to low levels, it's always going to be harder to measure. Is the "expert opinion" on the harms from low level of air pollution not much more than extrapolation from high levels? I don't know, but this is exactly the sort of thing I would expect from the public health community, so I'm interested in learning more.
Maybe you've seen it already, but 80000 hours interview "Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down" gave me a 101 intro to the topic as it relates to global health. IIRC Harish suspects that halving pollution doesn't quite halve the harmful effects, but that area needs more study.
I presume the number comes from claiming that air pollution is responsible for ~ half of heart disease deaths? not sure how plausible that is. Like most widespread environmental health things, I assume it mostly makes everyone's life expectancy slightly worse, which is qualitatively very different from randomly killing X% of people (like eg. car accidents do)
That would push me to wear an N95 mask on the subway, and to encourage my kids to. But I have no knowledge about the iron vs carbon question, which seems key.
As I was reading about time spent parenting, a thought occurred to me: kid's sports are taking up a lot of my time, for very little actual time the kids play sports. We're talking about pretty casual, community-center type sports for my kids (I have six, ages 2-10), not travel teams or anything. But even that just takes so much time! My four year old had a baseketball game yesterday afternoon, and my six and seven year old kids had a basketball game later that afternoon.
Watching four year olds play basketball is kind of hilarious, but it takes, from the time we start getting ready (looking for her jersey, finding shoes, getting a water bottle, etc.) to when we get home, maybe an hour and a half. And for all of that, she plays maybe 12 minutes of game time.
Compare that to just shooting baskets with the neighbor kids on the driveway. In the same hour and a half, they could get 90 minutes of basketball in, with ZERO time from me! Plus the benefit of figuring out some framework for a game among themselves, resolving conflicts, etc. Sports are great, but I'm wondering if my wife and I shouldn't find ways for them to play sports that don't require so much of our time. It's eating up huge amounts of our time, especially on weekends.
I'd be interested in thoughts on some alternative approaches here.
From my own childhood, we didn't have organized sports until several years older. We did a lot of freeform playing at the playground, potentially including informal sports (mostly tag and such, but we would also play sports if we had any equipment - a basketball is pretty easy if we thought ahead). I feel like informal was better for peer-level friendship formation and didn't push us towards such regimented and scheduled lifestyles.
Also, with six kids I feel like you're going to have a really hard time getting to all of their games no matter how you do it. Informal allows different ages to play together, instead of alternating each kid's specified team.
I have 3 of the "big" car seats (2 rear facing) in a RAV4 that has a measured seat width the same as my Civic.
Both Graco and Diono sell a model of carseat designed for 3 across. We have the Graco and have been happy.
What you do lose is the ability to use the "bucket" newborn seat that can be detached and carried with you -- my baby came home from the hospital in the big boy car seat. They are rated for as little as 4 pounds so it is safe, just looks funny.
Did divorce rates go up after the pandemic? I'm wondering if everyone's spending the same amount of time with their kids but more people are in the "single parent" category, so total time has dropped. The graphs here don't bear that out but there's also none that shows just total time with kids generally.
As for mental health...I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. This definitely was harmful in the short-term, but long-term was useful because I found resources to help me manage bad habits (and got access to stimulants). I'm still not 100% convinced that ADHD is well-defined enough to be an actual illness/disorder, but it's unquestionable that I fall outside of average on motivation, planning ability, executive function, etc. And it's unquestionable that there's a large genetic component to this - my whole extended family is made up of spazzes :P.
Medicalizing is really the only way to get this kind of support right now. I'm fairly high performing despite these issues, but don't work in a "standard" way. I tend to have intense bursts of productivity including long hours, followed by periods of complete uselessness. There's a real problem here in that there's value to constant dependability, but in large organizations that problem gets blown up. In any profession that logs progress by week, the metrics on my performance looks really bad, even if I'm still creating lots of value and being pretty productive. What I'm trying to get at here is I think the intense pressure to medicalize every problem comes from systems that really only recognize and support one kind of personality and productivity.
I relate this a lot to the U.S.'s rating system problems where 5 stars means "no problem" instead of "did something amazing or interesting." There's a misconception by management that there is one ideal of good performance and we measure everyone by how far short of that they fall.
Unlike most, though, I'm really glad I didn't get a diagnosis when I was younger - there are real problems caused by my weaknesses and instead of saying "oh I'm ADHD so I can't be expected to do that" I end up using tools I've had to cultivate to mitigate them. Nobody in my peer group believes me, but it's so much better to live this way, and you'll be so much happier if you do.
> We can at least get one of these two situations right.
You would think so, but it doesn't seem like that is where we are right now. From Los Angeles County, a story where CPS was called and investigated, they decided everything was okay, it was in fact very much not okay, and an infant died.
I keep hearing more and more stories that reinforce an idea I heard a little while ago. It's becoming easier to get away with things if you have less to lose, but much harder to get away with things if you have more to lose. That is, wealthy people fear CPS, while poor people don't. The same thing for crime/police, job loss, whatever.
And I suppose most of this isn't new. But I feel like the screws are being tightened both directions compared to what it was a few years ago.
I think that's certainly true, but I also think there's a story where:
* People working in government (police, CPS, etc.) are mostly just doing their jobs, which is to say they don't really take the impact on the public all that personally. Some are trying to be heros, but most just aren't. This is not all that different from people in non-government jobs.
* Because of that, for the most part, they are not trying to do everything perfectly, just to get through the workday. They are not particularly motivated to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, just to make sure that they can't personally individually be blamed for anything bad that happens.
* But also, people in these professions hate, hate, hate to have their authority challenged, and when that happens they will do everything in their power to punish and retaliate.
"Having your dentist three blocks away, walking six minutes for a haircut, four minutes for ice cream, or twelve minutes to the park is a game-changer when you have kids."
Other than the park thing (for which I think the suburbs win on the grounds of having more spacious parks with less competition for space for amenities like ballfields, and comparable if not shorter walking distances) this seems like an odd set of things to list. Like, unless you're optimizing for proximity to the exclusion of all else (possibly due to necessity and the *incapacity* to optimize for anything else), it seems unusual to me to expect these consumption amenities to be within a walkshed even in environs as dense as New York City -- e.g. there are probably doctors' offices every other block, but that's not the same as having pediatricians your friends or reviews say are good and who take your insurance every other block. Nor does the profusion of hair salons necessarily extend to "hair salons that take kids and don't suck at it." I think for my family each of these for the adults or our kids are either several miles away (adults' dentists) or, even if relatively close (e.g., kid's pediatrician and dentist are each about 1 mile away), aren't "walkshed for small children" close, and as soon as you get out of the walkshed the extreme latencies and other indignities involved with public transit make cars a much better option that also has point-to-point travel and adapts to your personal schedule thrown in to boot.
Like, yes, parking is a concern *if you live somewhere so dense that everyone's in competition for parking* - so the solution is to just not live somewhere that that's the case. But the case that public transit dependency is worse than car dependency just seems to me like it makes itself.
Also note that the park (the one that I would posit has the least and likely often negative comparative advantage for NYC) is the one of these that's *by far* the most important to use routinely. Why do we care if the dentist is three blocks away when you only go twice a year? This is what kind of drives me nuts about various putative consumption amenities alleged to be a benefit of bigger cities: the things that don't have ready analogs at lower density (yes, there are in fact decent restaurants in smaller towns) are the things that nobody takes advantage on a regular enough schedule for it to matter. Yes, the American Museum of Natural History or the Frick or the Met are all fantastic and no, you will not find their like in Westchester, but all that means in practice is that you're saving an hour and a half on the commute the one time in three years that you actually go to any of them....
I live across the street from Central Park, and there are 7 kids' playgrounds within a *10-minute* walk from me, so I think that's pretty hard to argue with on park access grounds. There are another 5 playgrounds (at least) 5 minutes further away that my kids go to regularly. And while my kids are too young to play organized baseball, there are a bunch of ballfields within 10 minutes as well.
The kid-focused hair salon that we go to is a 15-minute walk from our apartment, our pediatric dentist is a 6 minute walk from our house, and our pediatrician is also about a 15-minute walk away. The specialized pediatric ER is a 20 minute walk away (and we've walked there in the past), or a 5-minute drive away. All of these are very comfortably in a 3-year old's walking radius. And our grocery store and drugstore are a 5 minute walk away.
It's true that if you only go to the Met or the AMNH once in 3 years, being close to them is not a big deal, but the point of living in the city is that you _can_ go to the AMNH every month or two, or the Met. And it's a lot more fun for a little kid to go to a museum frequently for short periods than to spend a large part of a day once in 3 years when their attention span isn't long enough.
Also, public transit in New York City is a different beast, of course! We live by the subway, and it's ~12 minutes to the heart of midtown (plus a few minutes wait for a subway), so you have access to all of the city. I don't think it's at all obvious that public transit dependency is worse than car dependency in NYC.
I am pleased that you find your living situation suited to your taste (Poe's law disclaimer: I am not being sarcastic, it is good that you are living somewhere that suits you!). I would agree that car dependency in NYC seems nightmarish, but that's because it's so dense that it's essentially not an option. My personal point of reference tends to be low-density car-centric environs relative to dependency on the subway (or hypothetically the bus, although AFAIK even New Yorkers rarely go to bat for city buses other than maybe BRT), rather than the choice of high-density urban public transit versus high-density urban private transit. The former comparison seemed to be the ostensible juxtaposition being made above, and under that point of view I think it's easier to take a glass half-empty view of public transit dependence (Cue Simpsons Frogurt dialogue "I can go a mile and a half without the expense of owning a car!" / "That's Good!" "It takes 20 minutes where a car would take five, longer on weekends, and it's not point to point so you may have to fact additional walking time at either end." / "That's Bad.")
Thank you! And I didn't read your comment as sarcastic, though I appreciate the confirmation. :)
But partly the point I wanted to make is that while it's important for everyone to find something that works for them, your comment "It seems unusual to me to expect these consumption amenities to be within a walkshed even in environs as dense as New York City" was somewhat surprising to me, and I was offering my circumstances (with those specific amenities from your comment) as a counter-example.
For what it's worth, I have the expense of owning a car as well, so it's all downside for me. :) But mostly that's to use when we leave the city.
On net, though, compared to my friends who live in the suburbs, I think (a) my family generally spends less time traveling almost everywhere, (b) we have regular access to destinations that my friends families do not, except as an occasional trip and (c) the travel itself is more enriching for the kids, because rather than just sitting in their carseats, they're engaging with the city and the people around them.
Having said that, my kids are under 5, and I can imagine the mix of where we travel with kids may change as the kids get older, so I don't know if these advantages will persist. (In particular for (c) above, I think travel on the subway is a great experience for kids, who learn a lot in the process, but by elementary school, they've probably learned everything there is to learn.)
Interesting. I have the viscerally opposite intuition regarding (c), inter alia due to hearing protection concerns from the metal on metal braking, but also, like….everything else about the experience.
That's fair, though I certainly don't live by the most fashionable parts of the park; I have friends who live in the suburbs with houses more expensive than my apartment.
But having said that, living across from the park is actually *worse* for access to many things (except the park itself), because that area generally is not zoned for retail, only residences, so restaurants, stores, etc. often require *more* walking than they would otherwise.
The park was 40 seconds away on bike (we timed it as kids), or a whole 2-3 minutes on foot. This was the suburbs where a car was generally required for adults, but kids had access to a whole world with a bicycle.
We can inject some data here — here some data showing the percentage of people living within a 10-minute walk of a park, and it is indeed very correlated with density (though there are definitely other factors also):
Irvine invests more per capita in parks than probably any other city in the US, and it's still only #15 on the access list. Top 7 are all relatively high-density cities, by American standards anyway.
The data is relatively meaningless from a kid's perspective though. A kid doesn't care if it's a park, or a backyard they're allowed in with playground equipment. To gut check this I pulled up my childhood home on google maps a did a 450 feet circle around it. In that circle, when I was a kid, there were 5 pretty solid play structures in my friend group (probably a few more on the edges), a few yards we routinely used as fields for games, an awesome sledding hill (first 6 stitches thank you very much large ramp at bottom), 2 backyards with top notch fishing we had free rein in and (once we were in middle school) an island we were allowed to canoe to.
A map would show the nearest park at .5 miles, 1.5 miles and then a bunch within 3 miles (a short bike ride to be fair), but that doesn't reflect the reality of subrurban life and the potential of backyards.
My current backyard has 2 slides, 2 tire swings, a regular swing, a platform tree fort with a ~25 foot mast to hoist flags up and an outdoor archery range good to 100 yards (if you really must shoot that far). Do we still walk to the closest park? Sometimes (up to 4 times a weekend in the summer) (or drive when bored to slightly more distance parks), but the yard is the park.
I don't want to over-index on my personal experience as IME suburbs come in many flavors and higher-density suburbs with more nominal yards don't seem to offer the same advantage, but this tracks reasonably well with the medium-to-lower density suburbs in which I grew up. Back yards and space are load-bearing for recreation.
Have you done anything on tablets/edtech in elementary school? Seems like it's taken over a lot of public schools. I'm currently engaging with my school board about it but it's a slow and laborious process...and I think most parents just don't even know how much time their kids are spending on tablets in school. Here's my hotlist of studies/articles talking about the risks of this type of technology in schools but would love to see a Zvi treatment of this topic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yYsvhpO_z_6bnI6QX2pQ_TCbGjeIz39v-inRQlmisk4/edit?usp=sharing
Not as much as I'd like to. Good thing to consider if/when I have more time - thanks for the sources!
My kids having electronics and no textbooks in school was horrible. Where's Sarah Connor to blow up the Chromebook factory?
My niece is required to get a tablet at age 6 for public school. It makes me feel a little sick. Victoria, Australia.
Surprised you omit some important context.
Is there a way to track all the instances where police, CPS, or DCFS are called, and it turns out to be nothing? There's also the Department of Health who can send a social worker to your home if you have a child with lead poisoning (ask me how I know...)
I understand the hesitation to trust governmental entities like the police CPS, many of whom are crazy, evil, or flat out incompetent. The flip side is a world in which even worse horror stories occur regularly. People can be really bad, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Personally, I’d rather deal with an investigation (which I have) than risk children being neglected or abused just so I don't feel under suspicion.
I think you're imagining some sort of society-sized determination of suspicion that they can clear you of in some way, that doesn't exist? How is this going to prevent future suspicion, or your paranoia about potential future suspicion? Usually 'they called CPS on them before' raises rather than lowers these worries, if anything.
And yes, it would be good to have more data, and yes obviously at some probability of actual danger you want to investigate... but there's also a huge danger of them actually acting when they shouldn't, and the results of such threats.
Also, just a huge amount of stress even if it results in nothing - at a bare minimum, it confirms you have a neighbour who is the kind of person to call CPS on you, and if they've done it once they'll do it again!
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/childhood-and-education-roundup-7
About
> > Mason: "Parenting doesn't impact children's outcomes" is an absolutely senseless claim
> It is a deeply silly thing to claim, yet people commonly claim it. I do not care what statistical evidence you cite for it, it is obviously false. Please, just stop.
I think you need stronger arguments. The statistical claims are clear and reproducible. Sure, there are effects from parenting, but then they must affect something not so easily measured. Where is the error?
The statistical claims are that it doesn't significantly impact things like personality or earnings. I think Zvi's point (and others', including myself) is that it absolutely does impact the quality of their life, at least in the same way that any other close relationship does, and usually much more so because of the specific features of the relationship between a child and their parents.
I'm not disagreeing. Parenting influences the parent-child relationship. But the question is still to what degree that is genetic. Not every parent-child combination can express any parenting style. For example, children's personality influence their parents parenting style: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/how-kids-shape-their-parents-parenting-style
I think _this_ "question" isn't about whether anything "is genetic", or even about 'parenting style'. It's about remembering, as a parent, to give your children lives that are positive/good/happy/satisfying/joyful/exciting/beautiful/meaningful/etc., independent (but not regardless) of, e.g. the expected value of your actions to provide that on their future earnings or education credentials received.
If this question is reminding parents to remember to give their children good/... lives, then this is an environment effect. I agree that it is a good idea to remind parents of this because a) it might have a positive effect and b) the environment has a significant effect on parenting style (and I'm herewith part of this effect and strengthening it).
But the parent itself might not have this effect, e.g., because they may be unlikely to go against their natural parenting inclinations themselves.
Sure
My favorite example of this is Bryan Caplan, with his "parenting doesn't matter" book and also homeschooling all of his kids. Regardless of whether you can thread the needle to make those positions consistent (e.g., most parenting doesn't matter, but my extra special parenting does), the juxtaposition is hilarious.
I have five kids and have known about the issue of parenting presumably having little effect for a long time, so I had to make up my mind about it. My opinion is this:
* the kid's brain is (mostly) not going to throw away useful information about the world, thus proving an environment where the kid can experiment and learn useful stuff about the world (physical, logical, social) is probably a net good, so when in doubt about parenting choose by that criteria.
* parents have little influence on the long-term personality of the child
* parents' parenting style (modulo their kid's being-parented style) is probably largely genetic and you are not going to go much against your inclinations anyway (whether you rationalize a bad style or "choose" a good one)
* but it is probably possible to ruin things, e.g., if you are taking the "parenting doesn't matter" too literally and stop your natural parenting style in favor of neglect.
* do things that work for you and the kid (kind of tautological)
I generally agree, but also think people wildly overestimate the importance of parenting and wildly underestimate the importance of modeling the behavior you want your kids to learn, especially when they are super young.
Song version of this argument: (Watching You, Rodney Atkins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzGB6xDXKBU
(not directed at you, just generally): They're watching you, WAY close than you think. WAY younger than you think. You can't teach kids hardly anything, but good lord will they learn from you. How do you argue? How do you treat randos? What do you do when you smash a finger? When you're pissed off? When you're pissed on (hey, it's gonna happen)?
Ok, the obvious and hard stuff aside. Do you (again, the general you):
1. Model lifelong learning? Education is important (parents say), but are you learning new things and failing/improving at them where your kids can see?
2. Fix stuff or throw it out? Lot of people think we live in a consumerist/wasteful society and that we shouldn't throw so much stuff out so easily. Great! You ever live this?
3. Volunteer, especially when you and your kid have "better" stuff to do? How often does your kid come with you while you volunteer?
4. Live responsible alcohol consumption (or total abstinence as the philosophy may be)? I think this is one thing that sinks in way earlier/deeper/faster than someone would ever realize. My wife certainly is the model of her Dad on this and I'm much closer to the model of my parents.
5. Respect nature? Pick up trash? Go out of your way to improve wildlife habitat?
6. Swear inappropriately? Camp talk belongs at camp, not in the dining room.
I'm not saying you need to try and become a monk or a saint (a terrible fit for me personally), but long before "teaching" is on the table they're pretty much set in their ways as far as the basic subroutines of how you approach things/react.
I agree that kids pay a lot of attention to their caregivers. It is potentially existential for them. As I said elsewhere:
> Children expend more brain power on their parents than the parents on them.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/75jogPJeSCBtPArex/ignorance-in-parenting
But I'm not sure that role-modeling has a significant impact on their long-term personality. They will only copy what works for them.
His view is that parenting doesn't matter in the sense that it won't make one's kids different people, but homeschooling is better, e.g. more enjoyable and satisfying, for them compared to the alternative of sending them to school.
Re car seats we just ordered a Ride Safer vest and an optimistic it will make car trips markedly better. Certified down to 22 pounds, no hard seat or cushion or anything. Fitting 3 kids side by side is a major use case but we only have one and I’m mostly excited to take regular taxis again
We have this and love it for cabs and travel!
Regarding "Parenting doesn't impact children's outcomes," my recollection of Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is that he's very careful to say that parenting obviously matters, it's just that once a child has something like a typical western upbringing, you can't find a statistical impact beyond that
Yes, there's no statistical impact on things like personality or earnings, but there absolutely is an impact on the quality of their life, particularly when they're living with their parent(s) or their more-direct dependent, i.e. is the relationship and that time in their lives positive or negative for them, regardless of any permanent or long-term changes to anything else.
To my understanding, that leans very heavily on the "controlling for other factors" where other factors includes parental income, careers, education, and other traits that highly correlate with what most of us would call "good parenting."
No one is very surprised when the children of unemployed drug addicts become unemployed drug addicts. Or when wealthy doctors have children that become wealthy professionals. I feel like these studies see correlation and make the jump to saying that parenting *isn't* a cause, where that's the crux of the question. How much of that future success is something like genetics and how much really is good parenting, which also gets passed down through the generations?
It doesn't matter once you take away all the ways it does matter.
So let your kids do whatever they want, unless it's something where you shouldn't, then don't. Perfect life advice, where's my book?
My recollection of the adoption studies, though I'm hardly an expert, is that biological children of unemployed drug addicts don't do very well even when raised by wealthy doctors, and children of wealthy doctors tend to go on to be wealthy professionals even when raised by decidedly middle class families ("poor but culturally middle class" is about the lowest SEC that *can* adopt kids, so it's the lower end of the data set)
You're leaving us hanging on your favorite fiction book?!
That first graph isn't real, it's some guy fitting an exponential function to a handful of data points (sometimes just two) for each country
Re: car seats, I do it with infant - now toddler - seat and two cheap high back boosters that aren't the heavy type. Upgrading to the toddler seat made it worse, at least reacting rear, even with collapsible cup holders.
If there existed a booster without arm rests, it would be easier.
Also, we used a belt buckle extender for the middle seat.
Further, we tried this with the infant seat in a little two door hatchback and it was doable but it sucked, and not doable with the toddler convertible seat.
Once you have 3 the extra row of seats is a huge boon for car pooling alone, but our budget isn't there for that yet.
I’ve successfully done three-across in a small hatchback. (Two forward and one rear-facing in the middle.)
And we currently have three-across in the back of our mini van, since we have five kids. Definitely a pain to install but once they’re in, they’re in — so at least it’s not an ongoing hassle.
We did it by choosing car seats that are designed for three-across and that work from infant through booster stage. (Diono Radian 3r 3-in-1).
I’ve found it to be more difficult to include a booster in the mix because it’s hard for the kid in the booster to buckle themselves when there’s barely any space between the seats.
Fortunately the car seats we use work well in five-point harness mode even for kids who are getting pretty big. We have two who are about to reach the legal no-booster-needed age and we still have them in the five-point harness to avoid the booster-buckling issue.
Switching to the mini-van did not have a big financial impact for us personally because we got it used for $2,000. We value frugality/having lots of kids over the look of our car — the engine is solid but it has a ton of cosmetic damage. We got a bumper sticker to put on the back that says “my other car is a maxed-out 401k” 😏
Re: norms in public. I don't even subscribe to them but I adjust my parenting to meet the most stringent of norms when in public... well to a degree at least. Ask before offering snacks, get involved if my kid is involved in an altercation when the other parent decided to unnecessarily intervene, have my kids take turns (that one I actually believe in) and be mindful of others. I didn't make them wear masks on playgrounds though.
But yeah there are things you have to be aggressively not judgemental about, including approaches to breastfeeding on both ends of the Overton window ("why should I go through the inconvenience of even trying if there's formula", vs "breastfeed til 5"), gentle parenting approaches, a few others.
It is helpful to exchange parent information online but the norms are strong and get stringently enforced. Topics that are very stringent are safe sleep and car seat safety. Also leaving kids unattended.
Not a response to anything written here, but are any other New Yorkers concerned about childhood exposure to PM2.5 iron dust in the subway? Several studies have shown that the average underground subway platform has a PM2.5 AQI over 200 with the main element being iron. AQI over 200 is considered "hazardous", especially for children, and the concentration is almost 10× WHO recommended 24-hour maximums, but on the other hand (1) our children are not generally spending 24 hours in the subway, and (2) almost all the research on PM2.5 exposure has focused on carbon particles, not iron, so nobody really knows the effect of this. The source of the pollution is I think generally understood to be brake dust from the friction brakes used on the subway.
This seems like the sort of thing this community might know or think about so I thought I would ask here. I could imagine it turning out to be a "nothing" and also could imagine it turning out to be as bad as lead paint.
The most recent study is from 2024 and can be found here https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307096. Just ignore the focus on inequality; the authors measured all the stations and found that "The mean underground platform concentration in the city was 139 μg/m3 with a standard deviation of 25 μg/m3"; trains were not much better either, especially during station stops. Newsweek made a nice visualization of the data here (best viewed on desktop): https://www.newsweek.com/map-most-polluted-nyc-subway-stations-1936067
I would be interested in a deep dive on the evidence of harms for low levels of air pollution. We know that high levels are really bad, but, when you get to low levels, it's always going to be harder to measure. Is the "expert opinion" on the harms from low level of air pollution not much more than extrapolation from high levels? I don't know, but this is exactly the sort of thing I would expect from the public health community, so I'm interested in learning more.
Maybe you've seen it already, but 80000 hours interview "Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down" gave me a 101 intro to the topic as it relates to global health. IIRC Harish suspects that halving pollution doesn't quite halve the harmful effects, but that area needs more study.
"[A]ir pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths."
1 out of 8 people dying due to air pollution is laughable on its face. People making that claim nudge me towards thinking air pollution not a problem.
I presume the number comes from claiming that air pollution is responsible for ~ half of heart disease deaths? not sure how plausible that is. Like most widespread environmental health things, I assume it mostly makes everyone's life expectancy slightly worse, which is qualitatively very different from randomly killing X% of people (like eg. car accidents do)
I'm not concerned.
That would push me to wear an N95 mask on the subway, and to encourage my kids to. But I have no knowledge about the iron vs carbon question, which seems key.
As I was reading about time spent parenting, a thought occurred to me: kid's sports are taking up a lot of my time, for very little actual time the kids play sports. We're talking about pretty casual, community-center type sports for my kids (I have six, ages 2-10), not travel teams or anything. But even that just takes so much time! My four year old had a baseketball game yesterday afternoon, and my six and seven year old kids had a basketball game later that afternoon.
Watching four year olds play basketball is kind of hilarious, but it takes, from the time we start getting ready (looking for her jersey, finding shoes, getting a water bottle, etc.) to when we get home, maybe an hour and a half. And for all of that, she plays maybe 12 minutes of game time.
Compare that to just shooting baskets with the neighbor kids on the driveway. In the same hour and a half, they could get 90 minutes of basketball in, with ZERO time from me! Plus the benefit of figuring out some framework for a game among themselves, resolving conflicts, etc. Sports are great, but I'm wondering if my wife and I shouldn't find ways for them to play sports that don't require so much of our time. It's eating up huge amounts of our time, especially on weekends.
I'd be interested in thoughts on some alternative approaches here.
From my own childhood, we didn't have organized sports until several years older. We did a lot of freeform playing at the playground, potentially including informal sports (mostly tag and such, but we would also play sports if we had any equipment - a basketball is pretty easy if we thought ahead). I feel like informal was better for peer-level friendship formation and didn't push us towards such regimented and scheduled lifestyles.
Also, with six kids I feel like you're going to have a really hard time getting to all of their games no matter how you do it. Informal allows different ages to play together, instead of alternating each kid's specified team.
I have 3 of the "big" car seats (2 rear facing) in a RAV4 that has a measured seat width the same as my Civic.
Both Graco and Diono sell a model of carseat designed for 3 across. We have the Graco and have been happy.
What you do lose is the ability to use the "bucket" newborn seat that can be detached and carried with you -- my baby came home from the hospital in the big boy car seat. They are rated for as little as 4 pounds so it is safe, just looks funny.
Did divorce rates go up after the pandemic? I'm wondering if everyone's spending the same amount of time with their kids but more people are in the "single parent" category, so total time has dropped. The graphs here don't bear that out but there's also none that shows just total time with kids generally.
As for mental health...I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. This definitely was harmful in the short-term, but long-term was useful because I found resources to help me manage bad habits (and got access to stimulants). I'm still not 100% convinced that ADHD is well-defined enough to be an actual illness/disorder, but it's unquestionable that I fall outside of average on motivation, planning ability, executive function, etc. And it's unquestionable that there's a large genetic component to this - my whole extended family is made up of spazzes :P.
Medicalizing is really the only way to get this kind of support right now. I'm fairly high performing despite these issues, but don't work in a "standard" way. I tend to have intense bursts of productivity including long hours, followed by periods of complete uselessness. There's a real problem here in that there's value to constant dependability, but in large organizations that problem gets blown up. In any profession that logs progress by week, the metrics on my performance looks really bad, even if I'm still creating lots of value and being pretty productive. What I'm trying to get at here is I think the intense pressure to medicalize every problem comes from systems that really only recognize and support one kind of personality and productivity.
I relate this a lot to the U.S.'s rating system problems where 5 stars means "no problem" instead of "did something amazing or interesting." There's a misconception by management that there is one ideal of good performance and we measure everyone by how far short of that they fall.
Unlike most, though, I'm really glad I didn't get a diagnosis when I was younger - there are real problems caused by my weaknesses and instead of saying "oh I'm ADHD so I can't be expected to do that" I end up using tools I've had to cultivate to mitigate them. Nobody in my peer group believes me, but it's so much better to live this way, and you'll be so much happier if you do.
> We can at least get one of these two situations right.
You would think so, but it doesn't seem like that is where we are right now. From Los Angeles County, a story where CPS was called and investigated, they decided everything was okay, it was in fact very much not okay, and an infant died.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-12-02/dcfs-left-a-baby-in-the-care-of-her-11-year-brother
I keep hearing more and more stories that reinforce an idea I heard a little while ago. It's becoming easier to get away with things if you have less to lose, but much harder to get away with things if you have more to lose. That is, wealthy people fear CPS, while poor people don't. The same thing for crime/police, job loss, whatever.
And I suppose most of this isn't new. But I feel like the screws are being tightened both directions compared to what it was a few years ago.
I think that's certainly true, but I also think there's a story where:
* People working in government (police, CPS, etc.) are mostly just doing their jobs, which is to say they don't really take the impact on the public all that personally. Some are trying to be heros, but most just aren't. This is not all that different from people in non-government jobs.
* Because of that, for the most part, they are not trying to do everything perfectly, just to get through the workday. They are not particularly motivated to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, just to make sure that they can't personally individually be blamed for anything bad that happens.
* But also, people in these professions hate, hate, hate to have their authority challenged, and when that happens they will do everything in their power to punish and retaliate.
"Having your dentist three blocks away, walking six minutes for a haircut, four minutes for ice cream, or twelve minutes to the park is a game-changer when you have kids."
Other than the park thing (for which I think the suburbs win on the grounds of having more spacious parks with less competition for space for amenities like ballfields, and comparable if not shorter walking distances) this seems like an odd set of things to list. Like, unless you're optimizing for proximity to the exclusion of all else (possibly due to necessity and the *incapacity* to optimize for anything else), it seems unusual to me to expect these consumption amenities to be within a walkshed even in environs as dense as New York City -- e.g. there are probably doctors' offices every other block, but that's not the same as having pediatricians your friends or reviews say are good and who take your insurance every other block. Nor does the profusion of hair salons necessarily extend to "hair salons that take kids and don't suck at it." I think for my family each of these for the adults or our kids are either several miles away (adults' dentists) or, even if relatively close (e.g., kid's pediatrician and dentist are each about 1 mile away), aren't "walkshed for small children" close, and as soon as you get out of the walkshed the extreme latencies and other indignities involved with public transit make cars a much better option that also has point-to-point travel and adapts to your personal schedule thrown in to boot.
Like, yes, parking is a concern *if you live somewhere so dense that everyone's in competition for parking* - so the solution is to just not live somewhere that that's the case. But the case that public transit dependency is worse than car dependency just seems to me like it makes itself.
Also note that the park (the one that I would posit has the least and likely often negative comparative advantage for NYC) is the one of these that's *by far* the most important to use routinely. Why do we care if the dentist is three blocks away when you only go twice a year? This is what kind of drives me nuts about various putative consumption amenities alleged to be a benefit of bigger cities: the things that don't have ready analogs at lower density (yes, there are in fact decent restaurants in smaller towns) are the things that nobody takes advantage on a regular enough schedule for it to matter. Yes, the American Museum of Natural History or the Frick or the Met are all fantastic and no, you will not find their like in Westchester, but all that means in practice is that you're saving an hour and a half on the commute the one time in three years that you actually go to any of them....
I live across the street from Central Park, and there are 7 kids' playgrounds within a *10-minute* walk from me, so I think that's pretty hard to argue with on park access grounds. There are another 5 playgrounds (at least) 5 minutes further away that my kids go to regularly. And while my kids are too young to play organized baseball, there are a bunch of ballfields within 10 minutes as well.
The kid-focused hair salon that we go to is a 15-minute walk from our apartment, our pediatric dentist is a 6 minute walk from our house, and our pediatrician is also about a 15-minute walk away. The specialized pediatric ER is a 20 minute walk away (and we've walked there in the past), or a 5-minute drive away. All of these are very comfortably in a 3-year old's walking radius. And our grocery store and drugstore are a 5 minute walk away.
It's true that if you only go to the Met or the AMNH once in 3 years, being close to them is not a big deal, but the point of living in the city is that you _can_ go to the AMNH every month or two, or the Met. And it's a lot more fun for a little kid to go to a museum frequently for short periods than to spend a large part of a day once in 3 years when their attention span isn't long enough.
Also, public transit in New York City is a different beast, of course! We live by the subway, and it's ~12 minutes to the heart of midtown (plus a few minutes wait for a subway), so you have access to all of the city. I don't think it's at all obvious that public transit dependency is worse than car dependency in NYC.
I am pleased that you find your living situation suited to your taste (Poe's law disclaimer: I am not being sarcastic, it is good that you are living somewhere that suits you!). I would agree that car dependency in NYC seems nightmarish, but that's because it's so dense that it's essentially not an option. My personal point of reference tends to be low-density car-centric environs relative to dependency on the subway (or hypothetically the bus, although AFAIK even New Yorkers rarely go to bat for city buses other than maybe BRT), rather than the choice of high-density urban public transit versus high-density urban private transit. The former comparison seemed to be the ostensible juxtaposition being made above, and under that point of view I think it's easier to take a glass half-empty view of public transit dependence (Cue Simpsons Frogurt dialogue "I can go a mile and a half without the expense of owning a car!" / "That's Good!" "It takes 20 minutes where a car would take five, longer on weekends, and it's not point to point so you may have to fact additional walking time at either end." / "That's Bad.")
Thank you! And I didn't read your comment as sarcastic, though I appreciate the confirmation. :)
But partly the point I wanted to make is that while it's important for everyone to find something that works for them, your comment "It seems unusual to me to expect these consumption amenities to be within a walkshed even in environs as dense as New York City" was somewhat surprising to me, and I was offering my circumstances (with those specific amenities from your comment) as a counter-example.
For what it's worth, I have the expense of owning a car as well, so it's all downside for me. :) But mostly that's to use when we leave the city.
On net, though, compared to my friends who live in the suburbs, I think (a) my family generally spends less time traveling almost everywhere, (b) we have regular access to destinations that my friends families do not, except as an occasional trip and (c) the travel itself is more enriching for the kids, because rather than just sitting in their carseats, they're engaging with the city and the people around them.
Having said that, my kids are under 5, and I can imagine the mix of where we travel with kids may change as the kids get older, so I don't know if these advantages will persist. (In particular for (c) above, I think travel on the subway is a great experience for kids, who learn a lot in the process, but by elementary school, they've probably learned everything there is to learn.)
Interesting. I have the viscerally opposite intuition regarding (c), inter alia due to hearing protection concerns from the metal on metal braking, but also, like….everything else about the experience.
I hope we can agree that living across the street from Central Park is not exactly the typical New Yorker experience?
That's fair, though I certainly don't live by the most fashionable parts of the park; I have friends who live in the suburbs with houses more expensive than my apartment.
But having said that, living across from the park is actually *worse* for access to many things (except the park itself), because that area generally is not zoned for retail, only residences, so restaurants, stores, etc. often require *more* walking than they would otherwise.
The park was 40 seconds away on bike (we timed it as kids), or a whole 2-3 minutes on foot. This was the suburbs where a car was generally required for adults, but kids had access to a whole world with a bicycle.
We can inject some data here — here some data showing the percentage of people living within a 10-minute walk of a park, and it is indeed very correlated with density (though there are definitely other factors also):
https://www.tpl.org/parkscore/rankings
Irvine invests more per capita in parks than probably any other city in the US, and it's still only #15 on the access list. Top 7 are all relatively high-density cities, by American standards anyway.
The data is relatively meaningless from a kid's perspective though. A kid doesn't care if it's a park, or a backyard they're allowed in with playground equipment. To gut check this I pulled up my childhood home on google maps a did a 450 feet circle around it. In that circle, when I was a kid, there were 5 pretty solid play structures in my friend group (probably a few more on the edges), a few yards we routinely used as fields for games, an awesome sledding hill (first 6 stitches thank you very much large ramp at bottom), 2 backyards with top notch fishing we had free rein in and (once we were in middle school) an island we were allowed to canoe to.
A map would show the nearest park at .5 miles, 1.5 miles and then a bunch within 3 miles (a short bike ride to be fair), but that doesn't reflect the reality of subrurban life and the potential of backyards.
My current backyard has 2 slides, 2 tire swings, a regular swing, a platform tree fort with a ~25 foot mast to hoist flags up and an outdoor archery range good to 100 yards (if you really must shoot that far). Do we still walk to the closest park? Sometimes (up to 4 times a weekend in the summer) (or drive when bored to slightly more distance parks), but the yard is the park.
I don't want to over-index on my personal experience as IME suburbs come in many flavors and higher-density suburbs with more nominal yards don't seem to offer the same advantage, but this tracks reasonably well with the medium-to-lower density suburbs in which I grew up. Back yards and space are load-bearing for recreation.