(2025-05-30) ZviM Letting Kids Be Kids

Zvi Mowshowitz: Letting Kids Be Kids. Letting kids be kids seems more and more important to me over time. Our safetyism and paranoia about children is catastrophic on way more levels than most people realize. I believe all these effects are very large:

• It raises the time, money and experiential costs of having children so much that many choose not to have children, or to have less children than they would want.
• It hurts the lived experience of children.
• It hurts children’s ability to grow and develop.
• It de facto forces children to use screens quite a lot.
• It instills a very harmful style of paranoia in all concerned.
• This should be thought of as part of the Cost of Thriving Index discussion, and the fertility discussions as well.

It’s not that the economic data is lying exactly, it’s that it is missing key components. Economists don’t include these factors in their cost estimates and their measures of welfare. They need to do that.

Why are so many people who are on paper historically wealthy, with median wages having gone up, saying they cannot afford children? A lot of it is exactly this. The real costs have gone up dramatically, largely in ways not measured directly in money, also in the resulting required basket of goods especially services, and this is a huge part of how that happened.

Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids focuses on the point that you can put in low effort on many fronts, and your kids will be fine. Scott Alexander recently reviewed it, to try and feel better about that, and did a bunch of further research. The problem is that even if you know being chill is fine, people have to let you be chill.

This is in addition to college admissions and the whole school treadmill, which is beyond the scope of this post.

Current Insanity Levels

The good news is, at least when this type of thing happens it can still be news.

WBOY 12News: A woman has been charged after a young child was found walking alone on the side of the road in Glenville.

Gov Deeply: > The child, who was described as being about 7 years old, told officers that he had walked from a residence on North Lewis Street to McDonald’s, which is more than a quarter mile.

I was curious so looked it up: we walked 0.7 miles to & from elementary school each day, sun or rain or snow. Half the stretch was a somewhat busy road.
Definitely starting in first grade; maybe Kindergarten. Not a big deal.

John McLaughin: My 9 year old son was brought home in back of a police car Monday. He went to Publix, literally 500 ft from our home, to buy a treat w/ his own money. He’d done this several times before. The officer at the store that day decided he was too young to shop alone. It was infuriating.
Luckily, they didn’t arrest me

They did write a report and have an ambulance come out to check him. It was over the top and of course their basis for this was “endangerment.”

Did things get more dangerous since 1980, when we were mostly sane about this? No. They got vastly less dangerous, in all ways other than the risk of someone calling the cops.
The numbers on ‘sex trafficking’ and kidnapping by strangers are damn near zero.

One of my closest friends here in New York is strongly considering moving to the middle of nowhere so that his child will be able to walk around outside, because it is not legally safe to do that anywhere there are people.

Update on that friend: They did indeed move out of New York for this reason, and then got into trouble for related issues when they were legally in the right, because that turns out not to matter much if the police decide otherwise.

Scott Alexander goes into detail about exactly how dangerous it is to be outside, but all you need to know is that not only is it not more dangerous today, it is dramatically safer now than it ever was… except for the danger of cops or CPS knocking at your door

The Result of This

from BLS: Adults living in households with children under age 6 spent an average of 2.3 hours per day providing primary childcare to household children … primary childcare is childcare that is done as a main activity, such as providing physical care or reading to children. (See table 9.)

Adults living in households with at least one child under age 13 spent an average of 5.1 hours per day providing secondary childcare

Even secondary care is a dramatic reduction in flexibility and productivity. And we’re talking about a total of 7.4 hours per day, with 19 hours on weekends between both parents. That’s full time jobs. Weekends are supposed to be break time, but often they’re not anymore.

Some Progress on Letting Kids Be Kids

Some good news, Georgia passes the Reasonable Childhood Independence bill, so there are now 11 states with such laws: Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Montana, and Virginia

The problem for parents like John McLaughin and Brittany Patterson is, random safetyists will still call the police, and when they do the police often simply ignore such laws, as my friend found out in Connecticut.

Ultimately, this all comes down to tail risk.

And the reports are very common. Consider that 37% of children are reported, at some point, to CPS, this is from my Childhood Roundup #3, which also has more CPS examples in it: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-roundup-3#let-your-children-play

Shin Megami Boson: CPS removes around 200k children from the care of their parents each year. most of those children are reunited with their parents after an investigation. about 350 kids are victims of non-family abductions a year.

By napkin math, CPS is responsible for over 99.6% of annual non-parental kidnappings in the US

Ben Podgursky: there are a lot of really, really, really bad parents this is tough because parents should get the benefit of the doubt, but the sad fact is that the CPS abuse-of-power cases (which yes, are bad) are like 10%… it’s mostly kids in unbelievable neglect

Hermit Yab: 10% of 200k is a lot I would not be OK losing my kids to some psycho social worker because 9 other shitheads were bad parents. Actually it would make me even angrier.

Panopticon

Parents Mag’s “Top Pick” for a kid’s “1st Phone” lets parents “monitor all incoming & outgoing text messages…track location & GET ALERTS ANY TIME THEIR CHILD LEAVES A SPECIFIED LOCATION ZONE.”
My First Ankle Monitor!

They Even Close Playgrounds

New York City continues to close playgrounds on the slightest provocation, in this case an ‘icy conditions’ justification when it was 45 degrees out. Liz Wolfe calls this NYC ‘hating its child population.’

I presume fear of lawsuits is playing a big part in these decisions. There has to be a way to deal with that. The obvious solution is to pass laws allowing the city to have a ‘at your own risk’ sign when conditions are questionable, but the courts have a nasty habit of not letting that kind of thing work – we really should do whatever it takes to fix that, however far up the chain that requires.

How Did Things Get This Bad?

Thread where Emmett Shear asks how our insane levels of safetyism and not letting kids exist without supervision could have so quickly come to pass

Cartoons Hate Her: I think there’s a parental safety arms race happening where a fringe group decides something is super dangerous, slightly less crazy people are convinced, and within 5 years so few people are doing it that people call the cops on you for it.

Again from Roundup #3:

RFH: The amount of time women are spending with children today is historically unprecedented and making both women and children insane.

Working moms today spend more time on childcare than housewives did in the 50s and no one seems to think that this is a serious problem

Zvi: If this was because the extra time brought joy, that would make sense. It isn’t (paper), at least not the extra time that happens when the mother is college-educated.

Let Kids be Adults

They can handle a lot more than people think, remarkably often.

Not all 12 year olds, and all that, but yes. This is The Way, all around. Don’t simply not arrest the parents if the kids walk to the store, also let the kids do actual real things.

When I worked at the art gallery, we had a 19-yr-old do an internship with us, which my boss handled, and I brought along a 12-yr-old as my intern. My boss put the 19-yr-old in the café and complained it was so hard to deal with kids. I taught the 12-yr-old to do our accounting.

I literally can’t understand why ppl behave so weirdly around kids. They are just slightly smaller humans. They like to be useful, they understand things well if you just explain it with enough context. They are fun to have around when you work.

Adam: I could teach a 13 year old to be a capable CAD architectural draftsman. Probably be a project manager by 18.

In You Endohs: Just overheard a father explaining that it’s better to start a casino than a restaurant given the stronger revenue model—but that casinos are harder to set up from a regulatory perspective—to his FIVE YEAR OLD SON.

I mean, yeah, don’t start a restaurant, that never works out. Kids need to know.

Treat Kids Like People

Some people take this too far. Only treat kids as peers in situations where that makes sense for that situation and that kid, but large parts of our society have gone completely bonkers in the other direction.

Kelsey Piper: I also worry that if you tell all adults with good intentions to absolutely never treat teenagers as peers, then the only people who are willing to treat them like peers are those with sketchy intentions.

Sarah Constantin: yeesh this is from MIT?

Sufficiently talented minors are adults’ peers at intellectual work. they deserve to be real collaborators! Starting to think it’s a red flag for…something when adults repress any identification with “what I would have wanted when I was a kid/teen.”

I have heard enough different stories about MIT letting us down exactly in places where you’d think ‘come on it’s MIT’ that I worry it’s no longer MIT.

Lowering the Burden

How do we more generally enable people to have kids without their lives having to revolve around those kids? How do we lower the de facto obligations for absurd amounts of personalized attention for them?

The obvious first thing is that we used to normalize kids being in various places

Pamela Hobart: Things revolving around the kids seemed to happen almost automatically by the time we had 3 under age 4. I’ve never done things like cook separate meals or refuse hiring a babysitter to go out w/o kids. But just bringing them along to whatever the adults want to do is really hard and not always acceptable to others

The thing is this also relies upon the children being able to handle it. My understanding is that we used to focus less attention on children, and also to enforce behavior codes on them that were there to benefit adults rather than the children, and got them used to being bored and having nothing to do, and also they got used to being able to play on their own.

We need middle ground.

Screens

Screen time is one of the few ways to reduce the time burden on caregivers. It’s another day, and the same screens moral panic we’ve been having for a long time?

Modern screens have even huger downsides and dangers, and most of what is served to our kids is utter junk optimized against them, which is what they will mostly choose if left alone to do so.

I reiterate, once again, that this panic was and is essentially correct. The TV paranoia was correct, it brought great advantages but the warnings of idiot box, ‘couch potato’ and ‘boob tube,’ and crowding out other activities and so on were very much not wrong.