(2024-12-09) Zvim Childhood And Education Roundup7

Childhood and Education Roundup #7

Since it’s been so long, I’m splitting this roundup into several parts. This first one focuses away from schools and education and discipline and everything around social media.

Table of Contents

• Sometimes You Come First.
• Let Kids be Kids.
• Location, Location, Location.
• Connection.
• The Education of a Gamer.
• Priorities.
• Childcare.
• Division of Labor.
• Early Childhood.
• Great Books.
• Mental Health.
• Nostalgia.
• Some People Need Practical Advice.

Sometimes You Come First

The amount of childcare we are asking mothers to provide is insane, matching the restrictions we place on children. Having a child looks a lot less appealing the more it takes over your life.

Let Kids be Kids

*I mostly support giving parents broad discretion.

I especially support giving parents broad discretion to let kids be kids.*

*Erik Hoel: btw my jaw dropped when I found this. Why is this number so high? How do 37% of all children in the US get reported to Child Protective Services at some point?

Matt Parlmer: My parents got reported to CPS for letting us play outside.*

Cory: We got reported to CPS because our daughter had an ear infection that we already had a doctor’s appointment for

Vanyali: My niece got reported to CPS by the hospital where she gave birth for the meds the hospital itself gave her during the birth and noted in her chart. CPS said they had to do a whole investigation because “drugs”.

*Whereas this would the The Good Place:

Elise Sole (Today): Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard dabbled in “free-range parenting” by allowing their daughters to wander around a Danish theme park alone.* (free-range kids)

On a family trip to Denmark, Iceland and Norway, the couple took their kids Lincoln, 11, and Delta, 9, to a theme park in Copenhagen, where they had complete freedom for the entire day.

Then recently we have the example where an 11-year-old (!) walked less than a mile into a 370-person town, and the mother was charged with reckless conduct and forced to sign a ‘safety plan’ on pain of jail time pledging to track him at all times via an app on his phone.

It is odd to then see advocates push hard for what seem like extreme non-interference principles in other contexts? Here the report is from Rafael Mangual, who resigned in protest from a committee on reforming child abuse and neglect investigations in New York.

The result is a report that, among other things, seeks to make it harder for a child in long-term foster care to be adopted. I refuse to put my name to this report.

The committee also wants to make it easier for felons to become foster parents. They want to eliminate legal obligations for certain professionals, like pediatricians and schoolteachers, to report suspected child abuse and neglect. And they want to eliminate people’s ability to report such concerns anonymously.

They also want to make it so that drug use by parents, including pregnant mothers, won’t prompt a child welfare intervention.

Last week, for example, The Free Press reported that Mass General Brigham hospital will no longer consider the presence of drugs in newborns a sufficient cause for reporting a problem, because this phenomenon “disproportionately affects Black people,” the hospital explained.

Divia Eden: Lots of people on online forums seem to be super against kids playing hide and seek, since I guess the thinking is that it teaches them to hide from their parents???

At the ages my kids were most interested in hide and seek they were… extremely bad at hiding lol.

There is another way.

Here’s the story of two moms who got the local street closed for a few hours so children could play, and play the children did, many times, without any planning beyond closing the street. This both gives ample outdoor space, and provides safety from cars, which are indeed the only meaningful danger when kids are allowed to play on their own.

Location, Location, Location

Strip Mall Guy, obviously no stranger to other places (and a fun source of strip mall related business insights), runs the experiment, and concludes raising kids is better in New York City than the suburbs. I couldn’t agree more

one major downside stood out: our constant reliance on a car

There is one huge downside, which is that it costs a lot of money. Space here is not cheap, and neither are other things, including private schools. Outside of that consideration, which I realize is a big deal, I think NYC is obviously a great place to raise kids.

Connection

Lyman Stone: So, what happened in the mid-2010s to change the social space of motherhood to make motherhood a more isolated experience? my theory? the mommy wars, i.e. branded parenting styles that “are just what’s best for kids.”

sharp decline in time spent with friends

Whereas time with children has not actually increased

just between 2017 and 2021, the rate of “screened out” (i.e. not credible) CPS calls rose from 42% to 49%: people are making more unfounded CPS calls

My theory is that as parenting has just gotten more debated, heterogenous, and seen as high-stakes, it has become uniquely hard for women to socialize as mothers.

The Education of a Gamer

First you tell them they cannot play outside. Then you tell them they can’t play inside

I mean, yes, there are better options, but if you won’t let them do real work, and you won’t let them be on their own in physical space, isn’t this the next best option?

Prince Vogelfrei: I swear on my life having access to a world away from authority where you sink or swim on your own terms and are trying to accomplish something with friends you choose is one of the most important experiences any teenager can have. For many the place that’s happening is online.

Cognitive endurance is important. Getting kids to practice it is helpful, and paper says it does not much matter whether the practice is academic or otherwise. Paper frames this as an endorsement of quality schooling, since that provides this function. Instead, I would say this seems like a strong endorsement for games in general and chess in particular.

I’d actually suggest that school often destroys cognitive endurance through aversion, and that poor schools do this more

Priorities

From everything I have heard, South Korea could use lowered parental expectations.

Childcare

*If you use price controls, then there will be shortages, episode number a lot.

Patrick Brown: Child care in Canada is starting to look a lot like health care in Canada – nominally universal, but with long waiting lines acting as the implicit form of rationing, particularly for low-income parents.*

Sweden is going the other way. They are paying grandparents for babysitting.

*The real problems with childcare are that it is:

Too expensive. Often too hard to find even at expensive prices. Often understaffed, because staff is so expensive. Hard to monitor, so some places engage in various forms of fraud or neglect.*

Division of Labor

Early Childhood

*Robin Hanson: Care-taking my 2yo granddaughter for a few days, I find it remarkable how much energy is consumed by control battles. Far more than preventing harm, learning how to do stuff. Was it always thus, or is modern parenting extra dysfunctional?

You’d think parents & kids could quickly learn/negotiate demarcated spheres of control, & slowly change those as the kids age. But no, the boundaries are complex, inexplicit, and constantly renegotiated.*

No, I would not think that. I have children.

The obvious reason is that kids are dumb. It is that simple. Kids are dumb. Proper incentive design is not hardwired, it is learned slowly over time. And yeah, ultimately, this is all because kids are dumb, and they don’t have the required skills for what Hanson is proposing.

Great Books

Romiekins: Sorry for being a snob but if you are a grown adult you should be embarrassed to tell the class your favorite book is for nine year olds. Back in my day we lied about our favourite books to sound smart and I stand by that practice. (reading)

The context is reports that many new college students are saying their favorite books involve Percy Jackson.

Drawing children’s attention to poor mental health often backfires, to the point where my prior is that it should be considered harmful to on the margin medicalize problems, or tell kids they could have mental health issues

new research from the United States shows that among young people, “self-labeling” as having depression or anxiety is associated with poor coping skills, like avoidance or rumination.

David Manuel looks at Haidt’s graph of rising diagnoses of mental illness, points out there are no obvious causal stories for actual schizophrenia, and suggests a stigma reduction causing increased reporting causing a stigma reduction doom loop

*Ben Bentzin: This could just as likely be:

1. Increase in social status for reporting mental health issues

2. Increases in status leads to a further increase in reporting*

*Could this all be ‘a change in coding,’ a measurement error, all the way?

Michael Caley: lol it’s always a change in coding.

I don’t think this means it’s fine for kids to have social media at 14 but it’s a compelling explanation of the “mental health crisis” data — we are mostly not having a teen mental health crisis, we just are doing a better job looking into teen mental health because of Obamacare.*

No. It is not simply a ‘change in coding,’ as discussed above. There is a vast increase in kids believing they have mental health issues and acting like it. This is not mainly about what is written down on forms. Nor does a change to how you record suicidal ideation account for everything else going up and to the right.

Nostalgia

Kelsey Piper: When I ask people about their most treasured childhood memory, video games are on there pretty frequently. It changed how I think about parenting.

Some People Need Practical Advice

Mason: “Parenting doesn’t impact children’s outcomes” is an absolutely senseless claim made by people who don’t understand how variables are distinguished in the studies they cite, and yes, that’s a different argument than “genetics don’t matter.”

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.

In South Korea, babies born right after their World Cup run perform significantly worse in school, and also exhibit significantly higher degrees of mental well-being.

Mental Health