I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have gotten about destroying the lives of children and along with them the lives of parents and others forced to devote endless hours to actively destructive supervision.

I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.

People Don’t Let Kids Do Things

As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:

1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.
2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.

Harris Poll: More than half of the kids surveyed have not experienced many real-life experiences on their own. According to the kids surveyed aged 8 to 12 years old:

• 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store
• 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents
• 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them
• 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult
• 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse)
• 67% have not done work that they’ve been paid for (e.g., mowing lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting)
• 71% have not used a sharp knife

Lenore Skenazy: During that visit, I was told that children could never be left alone, inside or outside the home—EVEN IN THEIR OWN BEDROOMS—until they were 13 years old. Social Services said specifically that I had to be in each room with them at all times until they were 13. That investigation ended without incident.

…

When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.

Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.

“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”

Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”

There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.

Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year.

Half The People Are Worse Than Average

As crazy as the statistics are, the anecdotes show how much worse it can get.

The original context here was: A mother was saying she wouldn’t let her 13 year old go to a friend’s house, because they wouldn’t let that mother stay to watch.

Whole Blinkin Market: “It’s ok she doesn’t have to go” is FRYING ME.

elizabeth: She is THIRTEEN. If she was 16 or 17, yes this would be crazy overbearing. What are they doing at just 13 they don’t want the mom to see? She’s too young to be totally unsupervised. I don’t think this is too much at all. They’re babies.

RednBlackSalamander: To give you a sense of how quickly the parenting world has gone insane, I’m a Millennial and my friends and I all worked as babysitters when we were like 12.

I double checked the Red Cross website because I feel like I’m being gaslit, but yeah, our babysitter first aid certification class had a minimum age of 11.

Let Your Children Play

Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.

We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.

Girl about something: Is it ACTUALLY true that it’s good for me to let my baby entertain himself, or is it just selfishness because I can be doing something else while he plays? Tell the truth.

Based Sipper Wife | Mrs. Tomasone | Already sipped: It’s good for him! You know how people suffer from short attention spans and always needing to be entertained? Every time you let him play uninterrupted, you’re holding off that problem and helping him sustain focus

shiloh.: it’s so good, please teach your baby to play independently. if he were unhappy or lonely he’d cry & come to you. development of independent play is SO good for them (or course balanced with showing / talking / engaging)

is for baby whisperer: actually, seriously, a fantastic gift you can offer your child.

The problem, of course, is not any threat other than CPS.

Don’t Fear The CPS

And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.

And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):

MNBonnie: Over 54% of you need a visit from CPS. Holy shit.

Romy: wow yeah the logical conclusion here is that over half of all parents should have their kids taken away.

This behavior is obviously fine except insofar as someone might call CPS, but even if it wasn’t fine, it’s crazy to think about what that call implies.

Kelsey Piper: I don’t think that it’s a good idea to take peoples’ children away because they do a completely safe thing that is slightly different than the completely safe thing you do.

It is a bad outcome when CPS conducts an inspection of a family that is doing a great job raising kids in a lovely home but doing something slightly unusual. It is a way to terrorize those parents into compliance with standards that would never be the law and make no sense.

… I have had friends who have had their homes inspected because of stuff on the scale of ‘toddler fell at the playground and got a bruise’, yes. It was super stressful and probably made them inclined to be more safetyist and terrified of normal childhood falls!

Andrew Rettek: Yep. It sucks.

Romy: the number of people invoking cps every time they hear about a parenting choice that they wouldn’t make is really disturbing.

do you understand what claim you’re making when you say someone should have cps called on them? you’re saying that you believe their child would be better off ripped from the only home they’ve ever known and put in the care of strangers. moreover, you’re saying you believe the median foster parent is a better parent than their current parents.

you’re also saying you think we should dedicate state resources to carrying out this process. social workers already have caseloads too big to manage dealing with kids in homes with serious drug addiction, abuse, neglect and often fail to successfully intervene when it’s desperately needed.

you want these same social workers to spend time taking kids away from parents who leave them in a locked and air conditioned car for 2 minutes while they run into the store, or who watch them on the baby monitor while they catch up with the neighbors? really? if you were in charge of society this is what you’d do?

yep, in every case i’ve ever seen this raised for on twitter it would be infinitely worse than the home the kid is already in, even without accounting for the trauma of the kid being taken from their parents.

Mason: We also don’t actually want a society of traumatized and cowed parents

One function of CPS is to serve as a “wake up call” for bad parents. But you do not want a huge % of good parents making all of their parenting decisions under some abject terror that they may look negligent.

One problem with allowing any idiot to use the state as their cudgel is that a lot of people lack the imagination to anticipate the immediate consequences of their actions for other people, asking them to consider second-order effects is a total lost cause.

This is why a lot of older story arcs involve a “nosy neighbor” character who comes to embody something like the banality of evil or malicious ignorance. There used to be very strong norms against even *suggesting* that you might report people to the state for minor infractions.

Romy: the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept.

having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.

Freelance Cultural Critic: A mom I nannied for (approx 7-8 years ago now) said she went out of her way to find an audio only monitor from the late 90s/early 2000s and it was one of the only things that kept her sane.

 

Daycare

There is wide variance in the substance and quality of daycare, and also daycare is often not like preschool. There are some good ones, a lot that don’t care very much, and some that are outright abusive.

Mrs. Hat: sometimes I think uber trad daycare hating people have never talked to anyone in real life who has sent or gone to daycare? yeah some kids don’t love it but a lot of kids are obsessed and love going

my kids haven’t been in daycare because it’s so expensive but we do send the 3yo to part time preschool and she asks me every day when she can go back lol.

How do you mute QTs holy cow I don’t need everybody’s trauma!!!!!!!!

Mason: When I lived in Utah I used a group fitness gym w/ a daycare room with a huge window. I could see my (1-2 y/o) kid at all times

It was… just kinda sad. She mostly looked disinterested and would pester the minders to hold her, which they sometimes did.

OK, for like an hour/day.

I think she might get more out of it now that she’s almost 3. I wouldn’t be against enrolling her part-time in something like a forest school or montessori in maybe a year. But now that she has a sibling it feels like the value add is lower.

The kids could see through, but for whatever reason she wasn’t very interested in the window. I was very rarely at the front so it would have been difficult for her to find me. Some of the older kids hung out at the window most of the time looking for mom.

Those quote tweets? Here are four of the first five.

Audrey: I’ve worked in two daycares and I can count on one hand my former colleagues that I would trust with my children.

Samantha D: Wild how moms who choose daycare for their kids are all saying it’s fine and that their kids “love it”.

but all ex-daycare workers refuse to put their kids in daycare because they know the reality of what it’s like there day to day.

I feel like this means something.

Dresden Phelps: My biological mother was a daycare teacher who made CSAM of kids in her care. The assistant director helped cover it up and testified on her behalf. Fuck you.

SLM Goldberg: They don’t know anything else. This is also why these kids often bond deeply with teachers–they see them for up to 12 hours a day and only see their own parents for about 3-5.

And then there’s this one:

Lady U: I actually used daycare with my eldest part time! I stopped when I walked in on them holding him down and waterboarding him. They’d put washing up liquid in a kids cup, left it out, he’d drank it. He was pre verbal at the time. If i hadn’t walked in early I’d never have known.

There are some pro daycare takes too, but the majority responding have trauma here, often involving actual abuse. Obvious selection is involved in who responded but that seems like it is an important thing to know about daycare.

Daycare Costs

Daycare costs are, as we all know, completely out of control, with the price of child care now exceeding the cost of college tuition.

Kelsey Piper offers a blueprint for what it should take to open a daycare. If it’s good enough for California, it’s good enough for everyone else. I like the idea of an ‘anytime’ test, where you can be asked to take a basic knowledge test on the spot, rather than a scheduled harder test. And obviously requiring college degrees let alone any advanced studies in order to run a daycare is, and I’m going to use the technical term here, bonkers crazy.

Kelsey Piper: Running a small home daycare with 14 or fewer children should be legal in any residential-zoned area. This is how California does it, and nothing bad has resulted.

There should be an online course you can take at your own pace that teaches you about child development, child safety, the rules that you need to know and comply with to run a daycare, and what to do in various kinds of emergency. It should be fairly comprehensive.

You should be able to take a test at any time to demonstrate you know the material, including taking the test without taking the online course at all. Once you pass, you’re qualified – absolutely no requirements for a college degree or anything else. Right now some municipalities require that people spend years pursuing expensive degrees that don’t help them watch kids and make daycare insanely expensive.

There should be a single website with simple rules for making your home a safe space for a daycare. All the rules should be in one place. A normal kitchen should be good enough for food preparation. Once you are ready to schedule a safety inspection, it should happen within two weeks. The person who does the inspection should also take the fingerprints for the background check and get the background check handled and put it on file for you – right now you have to go to different places to do each of these steps.

That’s it – now you can open your daycare.

(Inspectors should drop in unannounced every few months to ensure that the space remains safe and that the child:adult ratios required by law are observed.)

Kelsey’s estimate is it requires a total of 20 hours a week for all admin related to her microschool, without breaking down how much of that is ‘real’ versus regulatory issues.

Lying

I am fully with Mason here, either you should be a Trustworthy Oracle who never lies (I choose this route) or a Trickster Mentor who lies constantly.

I’ve chosen Trustworthy Oracle, even though Trickster Mentor is more fun. For my kids in particular it’s clear Oracle is the only way.

I’m not going around telling kids Santa is a lie but seriously what are you doing.

Lady Wife of Sir Husband: Okay, I’m sorry but telling kids that Santa is real is a lie, actually, and I do think it’s wrong, and I do think you shouldn’t lie to your kids.

And you can’t actually say it’s not because it is, and your excuses are just excuses, and I still love Christmas and always have.

Okay, dropping answers to literally every rebuttal since y’all have all the same ones, then muting.

1. “but I didn’t mind that my parents lied to me” complete nonsequitor! Lying is still wrong; this post is not about your feelings.
2. “Grow up” Lying is childish, actually.
3. “Guess all fiction is evil then!” If everyone is in on the game of pretend, pretend is lovely. I love fiction, love movies, even love movies ABOUT SANTA. Just don’t lie. Not that difficult.
4. “SuPrIsE pArTiEs” yeah, I’m the childish one. Skill issue; do it without lying.
5. “but Santa IS real, herr durr”. Santa Claus, the modern fat man who delivers presents, is not real. He is not Saint Nicholas. He is a myth. And, no, he’s not the “spirit of Christmas” or “giving”, you hippy lunatics.

Mason: I’ve met exactly two kinds of parents I truly admire on this axis, and one of them never, ever lies to their kids.

The other tells their kids they’re made of lego and if you don’t come here right now I’m taking your arms off.

Basically I think if you’re going to lie to your kids about Santa you just need to lie to them about everything else, it’s only fair to let them calibrate.

I know someone’s gonna be upset about telling kids you’re gonna rip them limb from limb.

But parents tend to figure out who their kids are, and kids tend to figure out who their parents are, and usually they work out how to be happy together while sometimes mortifying outsiders.

Iterated Games

A puzzle for you.

Kelsey Piper: Switch controller is broken. 9yo says it wasn’t her. 5yo says a Canadian spy broke in in the dead of night and broke it. Baby says “I threw it”. I was ready to blame 5yo before the surprise confession from the baby, now I’m not sure.

Which is more suspicious, “a Canadian spy broke into the house and broke it” or “I threw it”? The Canadian spy, right? But I don’t know if we’ve reached the evidentiary threshold for having to pay for a new one out of your allowance when a sibling is confessing to the crime.

Different Kids Are Different

Aella: For me as a non parent it’s v confusing to have half of parents telling me stuff like this, that parenting is hella work, and the other half being like “no no don’t listen to them it’s actually amazing they’re just venting”

Scott Alexander: If I only had [dizygotic] Twin 1, I would think parenting is always easy and anyone who complains is lazy.

If I only had Twin 2, I would think parenting is always hard, and anyone who denies it is just Stockholm Syndroming.

Yep. I have three children and very much can report three very different experiences. That’s all the more reason that society enforcing supervisory norms so aggressively is terrible. There are nonzero children for which those norms make some sense, but no one can tell the difference.

Punishments

You cannot raise a child without punishment. You can only choose the form of the destructor, and pretend it has a different name.

Mason: I’m coming to learn that a lot of parents really don’t believe they’re using punishments as long as they’re not angry or mean when they deliver “consequences.”

I would agree that it’s good to not be angry or mean, but ultimately I think you’re sacrificing an important degree of self-awareness if you’re focusing more on your intent or tone than on what you’re actually doing and how it is affecting your child.

People try to deny that they are using punishment, as in this thread, but if you keep talking to them of course there is punishment, here a toy is confiscated. Yes, doing a better job linking action and consequence in logical space has its advantages.

But a punishment is any negative consequence of an action. In terms of ‘are you doing punishments?’ we need to focus on outcomes not rationalized intent, because that is what will be experienced and updated upon and anticipated.

Actions have consequences. Actions need to have consequences. If you don’t sculpt the incentives provided to children, then they will respond to incentives you did not sculpt rather than those that you do. There will always be things you don’t allow, if only for short term physical safety, and there will need to be ways to enforce this. We are all, each of us, talking price.

The problem is that modern parenting philosophy rules out all sorts of punishments, especially those framed as punishments, as somehow damaging, ineffective or both. Often I am told that consequences have to be immediate and local, but also that they can’t be things that actually matter. We give our kids dessert every evening, and the true primary reason we do that is that it then creates something we can take away, since every time I say ‘send them to bed without their supper’ suddenly I’m the bad guy.