Why Mommy Warring?

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ozy blog post, parenting

[Content warning for discussion of how hard it is to be a parent.]

Becoming a parent has given me a new insight into the mommy wars.

Parenting is terrifying. You are 100% responsible for the well-being of a person. They are utterly dependent on you for everything: for their basic requirements such as food and toileting, for their emotional needs like love and consistency, for creating an environment where they can grow and develop into the best possible version of themselves. Even if you delegate some aspects of taking care of the child to other people– and most people do– the buck stops with you. What’s more, you love the person. You want to make them the best person they can be.

The problem is that most parents kind of suck at parenting.

I’m not talking about beating your children or not. I’m talking about the normal kind of bad parenting. People who scream at their kids. People who forbid their teenagers from practicing the religion of their choice. People who misgender their trans children or make comments in front of their closeted gay kids about how gay people are disgusting. People who force their children into activities the child loathes for status among other parents or because the parent had always dreamed of doing that activity. People who are totally uninterested in their children’s lives. People who are creepily overinvolved in their children’s lives.

Viktor is a bit too young for me to have this experience, but my older parent friends tell me that it is very common to vow to yourself that you’ll never say that awful thing your parents did, and then you hear the words coming out of your mouth and then you’re like “oh, fuck.”

Think about your friends. Think about the quality of your friends’ parents. If you’re similar to me, you’ll notice that some of your friends will have exceptionally wonderful parents, some awful abusive fuckwit parents, and most will have parents that are just kind of crap.

I notice that when I talk to other adults about parenting, as opposed to about their parents, everyone seems to talk like everyone else is an exceptionally wonderful parent. I hear people say things like “oh, you love your children, I’m sure it will work out fine.” Or “you’re doing everything right, stop worrying so much.” Or “it is probably just irrational mommy guilt.”

I think this is a remarkable failure to use the outside view. I observe that most of my friends’ parents are kind of crap. I have no particular reason to believe that the parents of my generation are drawn from a different probability distribution than the parents of previous generations. Therefore, my prior probability– one that, of course, is updated when I look at how the people I know actually parent– is that most parents I know are kind of crap.

The worst part is that lots of parents who are kind of crap aren’t kind of crap because they’re bad people. Whether or not one is a good parent is gratuitously unfair. For 99.7% of parents, their opinions on transness will not affect whether they are good parents. For 0.3% of parents, if you make a wrong call on a complicated question– one that many intelligent, thoughtful people trying their best have made the wrong call on– you could fuck up your kid for decades.

I have, in my adult life, gotten to meet several parents who were pretty crap at being parents. (For obvious reasons, details have been changed.) To a person, they were all people who loved their children and were trying their best to be good parents. I have never met a crap parent where I was like “wow, I would definitely behave better than you if I were in your shoes.”

Crap parents might have children that were difficult for them to parent: children that were very very energetic, or children with certain developmental disabilities or mental illnesses, or children who were a complete temperamental mismatch with their parents. They might be poor, or mentally ill, or physically disabled, or have little social support. It’s hard to take time to let a toddler “do it by MYSELF” when the day care will fine you fifty bucks you don’t have if you’re late. It’s hard to have a sense of humor about a preschooler drawing on the walls if you haven’t had an hour away from your child in the past three weeks. It’s hard to do anything if you’re struggling with depression.

(Am I a kind of crap parent? Yes, unfortunately.)

The basic problem is that being a good parent is basically the same thing as being a good person, in the most boring and common-sense version of morality. Treating people with respect even when you’re angry. Being patient. Empathizing with other people’s feelings even if they’re hard to understand. Accepting other people as they are. Being grateful. Living in the moment. Taking responsibility for your own shit. Being able to manage your feelings without taking them out on other people. Being flexible when your plans change. Setting boundaries compassionately but firmly.

That makes it particularly hard to admit that you’re kind of a crap parent. Not only do you have to admit that you’re failing a person you love a lot, you also have to admit that it reflects a more general failure in your personality. Whatever coping mechanisms you’ve come up with to cope with the fact that you’re angry or impatient or irresponsible will get in the way of admitting that you’re a bad person.

Being a good parent is subject to the same moral luck as being a good person. It’s much easier to be a good person, in the common-sense way, if you have enough money and spare time and support from friends and you don’t have any mental health issues and you’re not in pain. Some people grow up in households that teach them to be cruel and irresponsible. Other people have terrible genetic luck.

I think this is why we have the mommy wars. None of the stuff the mommy wars are about matters. It doesn’t matter whether your baby eats formula or breastmilk, uses cloth diapers or disposable diapers or elimination communication, is sleep-trained or cosleeps, is worn or pushed in a stroller. You shouldn’t spank your kids, but if you’re basically compassionate and patient and empathetic, it probably won’t hurt your relationship with your kids or make them unhappy other than immediately after being spanked. Neither public school nor private school nor homeschool is right for every child or every family, and most children will be fine in any.

But the thing about breastfeeding and cloth diapers and cosleeping and babywearing and not spanking and homeschooling is that you don’t have to be a good person to do them. All kinds of awful people use cloth diapers. And unlike being a good person, which is a continual process of personal growth, you can be done. If your baby has never had a disposable diaper touch their booty, you have mastered cloth diapering.

So it makes sense that people get really invested in their decisions about diapering and spanking and homeschooling. They care a lot about being good parents, and they’re aware that most parents are not particularly good. But they don’t want to admit that they’re kind of crap, and they certainly don’t want to go through the process of personal growth that would let them become not crap. So they do magical thinking. They say “actually, the thing you need to do to be a good parent is to take your kid to piano lessons and send them to private school and never let their lips touch formula, and if I do that then I’m good and I don’t have to worry about it.”

And that works okay until they meet someone who is doing something differently and (gasp) thinks they are also a good parent. If you admit that sometimes people who use formula can be good parents, the entire system falls apart. So conversations about parenting get very vicious and very defensive very fast.

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The Iron Mathematics of Day Care

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ozy blog post, parenting

[cw: child abuse. Might not be a good thing to read if you’re a working parent who can’t afford expensive day care.]

Sometimes I get into conversations about why day care is so expensive.

My friends are Silicon Valley liberals, so their assumption when something is very expensive is that some government bureaucracy is going around making it so. However, in my home state of California, the rules for starting your own home day care are outrageously reasonable. You must be 18, live in the home, have no criminal record, take 15 hours of classes in first aid and CPR, and not have tuberculosis. There are various reasonable and easy-to-fulfill safety regulations: you are not allowed to have a loaded gun or an unfenced swimming pool, and if you don’t have liability insurance the parents have to sign a paper that says they know you don’t. The list of things which you are allowed to have is perhaps the most revealing, as it includes such items as using the same towel for every child, not washing your hands after diaper changes, and having an unlocked liquor cabinet.

I’m not honestly sure what room there is for decreasing prices by decreasing regulation. I am not sure whether there are enough people with tuberculosis dying to go into home daycare that they will have much of an effect.

The problem with home day care is math.

The maximum number of infants a home day care provider can legally take care of is four. Let’s assume your day care provider is making the Californian minimum wage of $11/hour. Let’s also assume that you have a spouse and both you and your spouse have fairly flexible schedules: you go to work late and your spouse leaves work early, so your child is only in care forty hours a week. Let’s also assume the day care has literally no expenses other than staff.

This day care will cost $440/month.

Now, I don’t want anyone reading this to take away “day care should cost $440/month.” That is the literal absolute physical minimum that a day care can cost. Most day cares have other expenses, such as taxes, rent (a huge expense in the Bay!), utilities, liability insurance, marketing, toys, books, cribs, and so on, which will add costs.

Let’s say you and your spouse both have jobs that demand you get in at 9am. Now you have to add in time for the commute, which means your child is in day care for longer. (Don’t forget to account for the time it adds if your day care is out of the way.)

And then there’s the question of how good care your child is getting for your, oh, probably it’s $650/month by now.

Taking care of babies is not complicated. The average sixteen-year-old can do a fine job at taking care of a baby, with a bit of training. But taking care of babies is really hard.

Sometimes they scream and can’t be comforted. Sometimes they try to stand up in their high chairs and do a backflip. Sometimes their poop explodes out of their diapers and covers their legs, genitals, onesies, and the furniture. Even if nothing goes wrong, they’re extraordinarily demanding– of cuddles, food, attention, play, diaper changes, songs, and being bounced up and down until your arms ache.

You don’t need a lot of knowledge to do well taking care of a baby. But you need spare emotional resources. You need patience and kindness and love.

In line with California’s general outrageous reasonableness on the subject, four babies is just about the maximum a human being can take care of at a time while making sure they’re fed, clean, and happy at least half the time. As the primary caregiver of a parent, taking care of four babies for forty hours a week is one of the most emotionally demanding and stressful jobs I can imagine. And you don’t get lunch or coffee breaks.

Minimum wage is not a lot of money: a person who makes minimum wage (assuming they’re not being financially supported by someone else) probably spends a lot of time stressing about how they’re going to pay rent and bills this month and definitely can’t afford to treat their depression or chronic pain. (Remember, health insurance costs money which we didn’t account for in our calculation.)

Do you really think our stressed, maybe sick person taking care of too many babies is going to do a good job?

I’m not talking about anything fancy here– I’m not saying “will she be able to feed the children a gluten-free vegan lunch all grown less than 50 miles away off golden plates?” I’m talking about things like: will she lose her temper and yell at the baby? Will she consistently notice every time any baby is doing something dangerous? Will she change the baby when they’re poopy or leave them in a poopy diaper until they get a horrible rash? Will she– God forbid– hit the baby, or leave the baby alone in the house for an hour, or shake the baby?

I’m not saying that our hypothetical day care provider is a bad person. If you make a stressed, sick person do an incredibly emotionally demanding job, at some point they’ll snap.

So let’s up the wage to $20/hour (including benefits), which isn’t exactly programmer money, but is enough that the caregiver isn’t constantly stressed about money and maybe can afford to see a doctor sometimes. And let’s say she’s taking care of two babies, which is a reasonable and sustainable number. Again, this is for 45 hours a week. Assuming that all other expenses are about 30% of what the caregiver earns, high-quality day care costs $2340 a month.

Very, very few people can afford $2340 a month, which is why most babies in day care are in day care with underpaid, overworked caregivers, who often don’t do a very good job taking care of them.

A while ago, a friend told me I should apply for a job at her company, which pays $70,000/year. I’d be good at the job, it’s a great environment, and I’d probably really enjoy it. I turned her down because, between day care and taxes (since my husband makes six figures), working a $70,000/year job would cause me to have an extra $15,000/year in my pocket.

Getting To A Fifty/Fifty Split of Parenting Duties

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ozy blog post, parenting

I find, now that I’ve had children, that I spent rather a lot of time bragging about my husband.

For example, a while ago, I was having a conversation at the library storytime with the other stay-at-home parents. They were complaining about how sleep deprived they were. Eventually, the conversation got around to me, and I said, “I’m not sleep-deprived because my husband takes care of the baby all morning every morning until he goes to work, so I sleep in until 9am every morning.” At this point everyone stared at me and I had to flee lest I be suffocated in a jealous rage with a onesie.

So, as one half of one of the Mythical 50/50 Parenting Division Couples, and also one of the 33% of couples whose relationship satisfaction did not decrease after having a baby, I thought I’d explain how we got here.

Partner selection. By far the most important factor in having a fifty/fifty parenting split is having children with the right person. Your spouse is not your slave, and you can’t force someone who parent who doesn’t want to.

One of the most important factors to select for is a genuine desire to parent. My husband is very enthusiastic about having children: in fact, it’s been one of his primary life goals for as long as I’ve known him. Other green flags to look for include an interest in other people’s children and experience taking care of children (such as taking care of a much younger sibling or a housemate’s child, or teenage employment as a babysitter). A lot of the filtering can be done simply by believing people when they tell you about themselves. If your partner’s opinion on children is “meh” or “I guess this is the socially accepted thing to do” or “how about I go live in a yurt in the backyard until they are five years old and therefore interesting,” you will almost certainly not end up having a fifty-fifty parenting division.

Unfortunately, even the most child-loving spouses can fall into patterns of inequality. I would suggest looking for a deep-seated commitment to equality and, if you are a woman or nonbinary person married to a man, anti-sexism. It’s important not to be fooled by male feminists who are woke on Twitter but sexist in their personal lives: in my experience, a man’s tendency to make male tears jokes or talk about mansplaining has surprisingly little correlation with how sexist he is in day-to-day life. It is difficult to make a list of green flags for anti-sexism, because there are plenty of good reasons for any anti-sexist man to not do any specific thing. A man with depression or ADHD may be unable to share chores equally, and a socially conservative man may disapprove equally of promiscuous people of all genders. If there is interest I may write up a list of things I consider to be green flags for anti-sexism in men, but it is a bit of a tangent for this post, so I’ll leave it be.

Be prepared. Two-thirds of couples find that their relationship satisfaction decreases after having a baby. If you don’t have a solid relationship, you should not have a child together, and you certainly shouldn’t have a baby to repair the relationship. A solid relationship– one with affection and intimacy and where you can resolve conflicts in a constructive way– is a necessity for a 50/50 chore division.

Many couples assume that they’re both equality-minded liberals and so naturally a fifty-fifty parenting division is going to work itself out. I think this is often false. I think it is a good idea to talk about division of labor with anyone you plan to coparent with. If you’re a woman in a relationship with a man, bring up the research on the Second Shift. If you’re the primary caregiver, make sure your partner understands and agrees that while they put in a 40 hour week at work you put in a 40 hour week at home, and that not even the military and medical residencies expect people to be on call 168 hours a week.

Long parental leave. My husband got three months of paternity leave and took all three months. (Thank you, Women in STEM retention efforts.) I don’t know how I could have made it through those first three months without him, and I salute everyone who has to be at home alone with a newborn. You guys should get a medal.

I think both partners taking parental leave helps in two ways. First, you get in the habit of 50/50 parenting division from the beginning, when it’s easier and you don’t have to juggle competing obligations. Second, it builds a sense of confidence. Many fathers and many parents who are not the primary caregiver have a sense of learned helplessness about many aspects of caregiving: they don’t know how to make up a bottle, change a diaper, or comfort a crying baby, and they’re pretty sure it’s an impossible skill they’d never actually be able to learn. Parental leave is a chance for both parents to learn how to parent when both of you are sometimes screwing it up.

Unfortunately, many men in America do not have access to paid paternity leave, and for many couples arranging for unpaid paternity leave would be a hardship. But I think that if your future coparent has access to paid parental leave and refuses to take it, that is an enormous red flag and you should strongly reconsider parenting with this person.

The right amount of criticism. Some books on how to reach a fifty-fifty parenting division recommend not criticizing your partner’s parenting ever. However, when I took this advice, I found myself taking over the parenting even on my off days, because I was the only one who knew that the baby needed his iron supplement or how to soothe his teething pain.

There are probably some people who are so defensive that whenever you say something like “the baby needs an iron supplement” they will respond with “I guess I’m just never going to be as good a parent as you are, here, you take the baby” and then they go off to play video games. Don’t coparent with those people. If you’re coparenting with a reasonable person, then they will respond reasonably to kindly and tactfully phrased criticisms, and you shouldn’t feel bad about saying them.

If you’re the primary caregiver or the person who did the most caregiving in the past, then you probably know things your partner doesn’t. You’re the one who takes the baby to her doctor’s visits, who has the most practice comforting her when she cries, who first sees her learning her new abilities, and who spends the most time frantically googling the best ways to treat diaper rash. It’s okay to share that information with your coparent! Your coparent might be thankful that you did, because they also want the baby to be healthy and happy and stop crying so much.

The core of the advice I read, however, is correct. It’s important to chill out. If it’s your partner’s day to take care of the baby, it’s very easy to get mad at your partner when it’s 2pm and the baby is still in his dirty clothes from last night, or to be like “ugh! I’ll take care of it!” However, that happens sometimes. It is a fact of babies that sometimes taking care of them is really hard and they are wearing dirty clothes at 2pm. This has happened to lots of babies and they pretty much all grew up okay. You should remember all the times that you didn’t put the baby in his new clothes until 2pm, and remember that if you try to take over then you will not get a break at all, and then go out to a coffeeshop and let your partner deal with it.

In addition, your parenting style is probably different from your partner’s parenting style. I tend to alternate between periods of focused play with Viktor and periods of letting him play quietly by himself; my husband tends to interact with Viktor every few minutes, while being on Twitter or playing a video game. I have a real tendency to go “why aren’t you doing focused play with Viktor? You should do focused play!” But neither of our styles are bad; they’re just different. The baby will probably have a perfectly enriched environment either way.

The only way to get the child to be parented 100% of the time the way you want to parent him is by doing 100% of the parenting yourself. If you don’t want to do that, you have to accept that sometimes your coparent will do things differently than you will. Obviously, if there’s a legitimate concern for the baby’s safety, health, or development, bring it up! But if it’s just different people having different styles of parenting, let it go.

Shared Environment Effects are Real

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ozy blog post, parenting

I am a very heretical rationalist, because I believe in an effect of parenting on children.

Among relatively homogeneous samples, about half of variation is genetic, while about half of variation is the product of nonshared environment. However, much of nonshared environment may be the product of measurement error: more careful studies suggest, for example, that 85% of variation in personality is explained by genetics and only 15% by non-shared environment, suggesting that a full 70% of non-shared environment is actually measurement error.

Some people conclude from that study that, in fact, nothing has an effect on anything and your entire personality is based on genetics. I conclude from that study that this is not a very reliable test.

It is very very difficult to pick up small effects with unreliable tests. You need a huge sample size to do so. Twin studies don’t generally have huge sample sizes, because there just aren’t that many twins in the world. And even social science studies that don’t have any twins are regularly underpowered, because journals don’t care about statistical power in the same way that they care about p-values.

It definitely looks like we’re in the sort of world where parenting could have effects. Studies of children who grew up in Romanian orphanages have shown that spending more than six months in the orphanages– in which they had inadequate food, poor hygiene, little social or intellectual stimulation, and no love or affection– results in cognitive impairment, autismlike symptoms, and emotional problems. There is a shared environment effect in heterogeneous samples– such as those which include both rich and poor parents– which is presumably not solely because of the salutary effects inherited wealth can have on the personality. If we know that extreme differences in parenting have effects we can detect, and we know that there are lots of small effects we wouldn’t be able to detect even in principle, then it seems to me that we should assume those small effects exist.

Believing in zero role for shared environment also fails to pass the sniff test. Lots of people, I think, will agree that whether or not you talk to your baby might not have any long-term consequences. But the “zero role for shared environment” position requires yourself to commit to the position that all of the following have either zero correlation between siblings or no effect on children’s psychology whatsoever:

• Lead poisoning.
• All other forms of air and water pollution.
• Prenatal nutrition.
• Drinking during pregnancy. (Not just light drinking, I mean slamming down ten shots a night every night for your entire pregnancy.)
• Smoking during pregnancy.
• Illicit drug use during pregnancy.
• Secondhand smoke exposure during childhood.
• Childhood nutrition.
• Childhood sleep deprivation.
• School quality.
• Whether there are drugs being sold in front of your house.
• Childhood mental health treatment.
• Childhood physical health treatment.

Sure, maybe you can quibble about one or another of these. Maybe you think that sending your kid to Andover will result in exactly the same consequences as sending your kid to a school where they learn that evolution is a lie because the Loch Ness Monster is real. Maybe you think there’s no real harm in feeding your child lead paint for dinner and that fetal alcohol syndrome is a lie made up by people who just want you to stop having fun, man. Maybe you think no one ever smokes through more than one pregnancy. But it seems really implausible to me that every single one of those either doesn’t have an effect or isn’t correlated between siblings.

People who don’t believe in shared environment sometimes propose mechanisms for what non-shared environment is. “Maybe siblings have different friends!” they say. Okay, and your claim is that there is literally zero correlation between who siblings are friends with? No parents ever bring all their children to another child’s house for a shared playdate? Poorly funded inner-city schools contain exactly the same set of people to be friends with as wealthy schools in the suburbs? “Parents treat different children differently!” they say. Okay, and your claim is that there is literally zero correlation between how parents treat one kid and another kid? No similarities based on a parent being a really angry person, or a really demanding person, or a single mom working three jobs who barely has time to take care of herself let alone a child?

The only reasonable course here is to grant “okay, maybe lead poisoning might increase criminality, and children who grow up in a house with lead paint are more likely to have lead poisoning than other children.” That opens the door for other small effects of parenting as well.

The interesting consequence of this argument, however, is that we don’t have much scientific evidence what the good forms of parenting are. There are few randomized controlled trials of parenting strategies. You can do an encouragement design, in which some parents are given free Baby Einstein videos or sent to educational classes about how you shouldn’t spank your children. Unfortunately, since many parents won’t change their behavior even with a class or a free video, you have to have a huge sample size, which is very expensive. So most people just do observational studies, which are cheaper.

Essentially all observational studies of parenting strategies suffer from healthy user bias. The sort of people who follow parenting advice are different from the sort of people who don’t follow parenting advice. They’re more conscientious. They put more effort into parenting. They care about doing right by their children. If nothing else, they’re more likely to follow all the other parenting advice, and that includes obviously correct things like “don’t let your child eat lead paint.” It’s very difficult to control for all of these factors. So if a study finds that following conventional parenting advice makes your child healthier, more talented, and kinder, it doesn’t actually tell you a heck of a lot. (On the other hand, if a study tells you that not following conventional parenting advice makes your child healthier, more talented, and kinder, you should probably listen to that study.)

One heuristic I’ve been using is thinking about the effects I can expect to have on my spouse. There are a lot of similarities: we live together, we spend a lot of time together, and we’ll do so for years. I think our intuitions about our effects on our spouses are less biased than our intuitions about our effects on our children, because we don’t have a ridiculous guilt-inducing culture that believes that if we just do everything right any spouse can make a six-figure income, live to age 100, and be ecstatically happy at all times. These are my intuitions about my spouse:

• My husband’s basic temperament is set. He is always going to be basically himself, no matter what I do.
• I have a huge effect on how much my husband likes me and how good our relationship is.
• I could traumatize him if I chose to behave in an unconscionable way.
• I definitely have it in my power to make my husband miserable, but it’s not in my power to make my husband happy– brain chemistry and other life influences have their role.
• I am only one influence on my husband’s behavior. The effect of my actions is real, but I cannot automatically cause anything to happen.
• I can share information with my husband that changes his behavior.
• I can model behaviors I’d like my husband to pick up. If my husband sees me exercising, he’s more likely to exercise himself.
• I can reward my husband for doing things I want him to do, but I shouldn’t expect that he’d keep doing the thing if I stopped rewarding him.
• I can introduce my husband to experiences he otherwise wouldn’t have but that he enjoys.
• I can support my husband and allow him to achieve things he wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
• None of those five things work 100% of the time. How well they work on any given subject depends on my husband’s preferences, temperament, and choices.
• Perhaps most of the effect I have on my husband’s personality does not come from my deliberate efforts. It comes from how he responds to my everyday behaviors.
• If we stayed married for twenty years and then he divorced me, I’d expect my effects on his personality to decrease over time, but there’d always be an effect that came from me.

Of course, children and spouses are different in many ways. For one thing, not loving an infant causes far worse long-term consequences than not loving a spouse. But I think as a first-pass heuristic for what effects you can and can’t have, and how you can have them, this is pretty reasonable.

Thoughts on Parenting An Infant

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ozy blog post, parenting

(You should probably take this post with several grains of salt, because my son is only seven months old, and he is also a very very easygoing baby. He does not cry unless there is a reason and is usually soothed relatively easily. I would take credit for my excellent parenting but I am perfectly aware that it is the product of his innate temperament.)

Before I became a parent, I read about attachment parenting, the Ferber method, RIE, cosleeping, elimination communication, the Happiest Baby on the Block, and various other baby-parenting strategies and philosophies. However, after Viktor was born, I invented my own philosophy of parenting babies. It is called If The Baby Wants It It Is Probably Good For Him.

I feed Viktor whenever he seems to be hungry. I put him down for a nap when he seems to be drowsy. (He does have a regular bedtime, because he’s better at falling asleep for naps than he is at falling asleep in the evening, and if he doesn’t have a bedtime he stays up too late and gets crabby.) I started solids when he started grabbing for food; when he kept grabbing for the spoon and trying to put it in his mouth, I switched to giving him soft food that he could feed himself with. I put him in his baby swing when he was fussy until he was about four months old, when it started making him cry more; I assumed that meant he’d grown out of it. I carry him and cuddle him when he is fussy but not hungry, because that calms him down.

I put all his toys on the floor so that he could crawl around and put them in his mouth, which is the thing he finds most interesting in all the world. I talk to him regularly, because he seems to enjoy it. I try out various games and repeat the ones that make him laugh. (The book The Wonder Weeks makes some dubious factual claims, but its list of games to play with babies is top-notch; Viktor loves almost all of them.) Therefore, I spend lots of time bouncing him on my knees, chomping on his ears, dancing my fingers on his tummy, holding onto his hands and pulling his torso in circles while he sits, and turning him upside down so he stands on his head.

I think this is a pretty good parenting philosophy. In the short run, I’m doing things that make him happy and not doing things that make him unhappy, which means that he probably enjoys life overall most of the time.

As for the long run, well, I think the wants and needs of babies have evolved for millions of years. Throughout most of those millions of years, no one read any parenting books or followed any American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines. No one had clocks to schedule the baby’s next feeding. It seems to me that babies probably evolved to guide their parents into doing what is best for them. It would be really weird if evolution made babies cry to be held if actually being held was really bad for them; it would be very strange if evolution made exploration, conversation, roughhousing, and music rewarding to babies if they didn’t get anything out of it.

There aren’t a lot of randomized controlled trials of parenting; the evidence about what parenting strategies work best in the long term is pretty limited. So in the short run I’m going to follow the guidance of evolution.

I think there are two general exceptions to the rule that If The Baby Wants It It Is Probably Good For Him. These are safety and sanity (parental).

First, sometimes babies are just wrong about whether things are dangerous or beneficial. For example, Viktor does not know that if he chomps on an electrical cord he could get an electric shock; he just knows that he likes exploring things with his mouth. Viktor does not know that vaccinations protect him from disease; he just knows that they hurt. Viktor does not know that eleven percent of American one-year-olds are anemic; he just knows that his iron supplement makes him gag. In all such cases, it makes sense for the parent to overrule the baby.

Second, parents need to maintain their sanity. Sometimes you need to set the baby down for a bit. Sometimes you need to set the baby down for a bit even though the baby is screaming and needs attention RIGHT NOW. RIGHT NOW!!!! No child ever died of being left to cry for fifteen minutes in a crib, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need so that you don’t scream or shake the baby.

One particularly important area for parental sanity is sleep. A randomized controlled trial has shown that letting your child cry it out has absolutely no long-term effect. While studies have suggested that bedsharing is slightly more dangerous than not bedsharing,the effect size is quite small and probably outweighed by the fact that a parent who has gotten enough sleep is less likely to get into a car accident. There is no reason to believe that there are any long-term psychological effects from any way of sleeping with your child. Bedsharing will not cause your child to be dependent, and cry-it-out-style sleep training will not result in poor attachment or lifelong trauma.

In conclusion, with a handful of exceptions such as putting your child on their back and not trying to train a newborn to sleep through the night, the right way to handle your child’s sleep is the way that gets you enough sleep.

When I first had Viktor, I thought we would bedshare. However, Viktor would sometimes roll under me in a frightening way and sometimes roll off the bed. We got a cosleeper and that worked really well for the first six months. When Viktor turned six months old, waking up three times a night to feed him became unsustainable. We tried gentle sleep-training strategies with limited success and eventually settled on putting Viktor in his own room and closing both our door and the door to his bedroom. His bedroom is very safe, infant mortality is quite low, and he usually stays in his cosleeper all night, so not being able to hear him is a risk we’re comfortable taking. He is happy and cheerful in the morning and the upstairs neighbors haven’t complained, and when he goes to sleep at bedtime he fusses for five to ten minutes before he goes to sleep.

In summary, here are the key points of the Ozy Baby Parenting Philosophy:

• Give babies what they want.
• Most babies want food, cuddles, music, play, naptime, conversation, and rocking motions, but your baby is the expert on what they want.
• Parenting books should be used for ideas about what your baby might want, not as rigid rules about what you have to follow.
• Don’t let babies do things that hurt them.
• Don’t let babies do things that make you want to scream and tear your hair out.
• Sleep is incredibly important and, unless there is a safety concern that outweighs the risk of a sleep-deprived person crashing a car, you should do whatever gives you enough sleep.

Universal Design for Parenting

Tags

disability, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, parenting

Due to family history, I have a child at higher risk of certain disabilities: mood disorders, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, and autism spectrum conditions. Even if I don’t have a child who is disabled enough by these conditions to qualify for a diagnosis, they may have subclinical symptoms.

So there’s sort of an interesting question, which is how– as a parent– you deal with knowing that your child is at elevated risk of having one of these conditions.

My philosophy as a prospective parent has been affected by the principles of universal design. Basically, it is much easier and less expensive to design things ahead of time with the needs of disabled people in mind, rather than to retrofit a building or an object which was designed without thinking about disabled people. Think about architecture. If you’re planning for disabled people ahead of time, you can incorporate a ramp into the original blueprint and build it along with everything else. If you wait until the first person with a wheelchair wants to use your building (or until regulations require you to let them in), then retrofitting is probably going to be really expensive, result in an ugly and awkwardly positioned ramp, and require you to close the building for six months for construction.

I think there’s a similar thing for parenting disabled children. Parents of disabled children often grieve the loss of their expectations and hopes for their child. In some tragic cases, the parents become bitter and angry at their children for not being the children they wanted, in some cases going so far as to accuse the children of ruining their lives. Discovering a child is disabled involves a major reworking of a number of aspects of family life, whether that means setting aside time for physical therapy with your child each day, learning techniques to manage your emotionally or developmentally disabled child’s meltdowns, searching for wheelchair dance lessons, or simply shuttling your child from appointment to appointment.

There’s also a cost for the children. Children with many disabilities– particularly invisible disabilities– may go undiagnosed for years, in which time their needs are not accommodated, they aren’t learning the skills they need to succeed as disabled people, and they may acquire toxic shame and anxiety that follows them for the rest of their lives. In some cases, a lifelong disability may not be diagnosed until the person is an adult, in which case they’ve gone through their entire childhood without appropriate accommodations or support.

Universal design for parenting doesn’t mean assuming that all children are disabled: of course, even in families with a history of disability, many children will be abled. But it does mean parenting in a way that would be good parenting whether the child is disabled or not.

For instance, I’ve mentally prepared myself for the prospect that my child is disabled, including forms of disability I might otherwise have a particularly hard time dealing with (such as intellectual disability, the child being nonverbal, or violent meltdowns). I’ve talked to my husband about disability to make sure we share the same values, the same way I would talk about other parenting issues like discipline or education or screen time. My children are at risk of childhood-onset depression, so I’m taking the perhaps unusual step of proactively taking them to psychological checkups. Hopefully, they will feel comfortable talking about their symptoms with a therapist, even if they don’t want to bring them up with a doctor. (Of course, I am not going to look at my children’s therapy records; since children have no legal right to confidentiality, it’s particularly important for parents to be conscientious about allowing them their privacy.)

There are also some accommodations I can implement without a disability. I can make a particular effort to validate my children’s feelings, because invalidating environments tend to exacerbate symptoms in children with a genetic predisposition to borderline personality disorder. I can proactively teach emotional regulation skills. If it seems like my child might benefit from social stories or visual schedules, commonly used to help autistic children, I can use them. I can purchase toys that help develop fine and gross motor skills, which autistic children are particularly likely to have trouble with. I can have a daily routine, which helps children with ADHD and autism. I can avoid shaming my child for forgetting or losing things, which leads to the comorbid anxiety that causes so many problems for adults with ADHD. I can try giving children clear instructions (“put your toys on the shelf,” not “clean your room”), which helps children with ADHD remember things.

Naturally, I haven’t done universal design for parenting for every conceivable disability. For instance, there is a step outside my front door, even though this would be inaccessible for a child who uses a wheelchair. I haven’t learned ASL, even though Deaf children with access to sign language have higher academic performance, and have no intentions of raising my children bilingually in sign and English. That’s because both of those would be fairly costly for me– I’d have to move, I’d have to learn a new language– and I have no reason to expect my children are any more likely than average to be Deaf or use wheelchairs. But I think if your child has an above-average chance of having certain disabilities, it’s worth it to be prepared.

Open Thread: Effective Altruism and Children

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post, parenting

[DISCLAIMER: Wanting to increase the chance that my child has a particular trait does not mean that I would not love, respect, accept, and approve of a child without that trait, and if you think that is impossible I am somewhat worried about your mindset when you avoid teratogens. I have read Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and think increasing children’s altruism is positive in expectation even given the book’s arguments.]
[COMMENTING NOTE: While opinions from non-effective-altruists are welcome, comments along the lines of “have you considered not being an effective altruist?” will be deleted.]

I’ve been reading about increasing the chance that your children are altruistic. It seems like two things that increase the chance are modeling altruism yourself and giving the child opportunities to engage in altruism in an age-appropriate way.

I would like to increase the chance that my son is an effective altruist, which means that modeling ineffective altruism is kind of pointless. The behavior I want to model and to offer opportunities for is thinking about how to do the most good and doing it, not doing something for signaling value and warm fuzzies. But the forms of altruistic behavior my husband and I engage in look like going to work (him) and typing on a computer keyboard (me), neither of which models altruistic behavior specifically. And children, particularly before adolescence, generally have a limited ability to earn to give or fill talent gaps in important organizations [citation needed].

Things I have thought of so far include:

• Political involvement in effective causes (protests, phonebanking, canvassing, letter-writing).
• Discussing effective altruism in front of my child.
• Running an age-appropriate Giving Game once a year so he gets experience in charity selection.
• Offering opportunities for my child to write or speak about effective altruist ideas (maybe he can guest-post on my blog).
• Trick-or-treating for UNICEF (or AMF?).
• Eating a lacto vegetarian diet and explaining why (in an age-appropriate way, I don’t plan to show my toddler factory farming videos).
• Explicitly connecting things I and my husband do to effective altruism (I do research to help wild animals; Topher works as a programmer so he can donate to charity).
• Explicitly connecting things my child does to effective altruism (learning reading, writing, math, and natural and social science will help you improve the world in the future).

Does anyone else have suggestions?

Book Post for November, Parenting and Fiction Books

Tags

diane duane, elizabeth bear, emily st. john mandel, georgette heyer, mary renault, parenting

The Nursing Mother’s Companion: Look, in six months I will tell you which of these breastfeeding books I liked the best. This one has individual survival guides for various stages of breastfeeding, covering concerns such as mastitis and nursing strikes that occur at various ages, which seems very useful and a clear improvement on how scattered they are in many nursing books.

Precious Little Sleep: The Complete Baby Sleep Guide for Modern Parents: Highly recommended; evidence-based and extraordinarily complete. I appreciate that the author characterizes both “cry-it-out” and “no-cry” methods of sleep parenting as right for some parents and some babies; this seems to me to be consistent with the research. (No, cry-it-out will not ruin your attachment with your baby, nor will no-cry methods prevent your child from developing independence.)

Newborn sleep is generally all over the place and there’s not much point to sleep training before the child is about two to four months old. Use lots of soothing techniques and try not to let your newborn stay awake too long, lest they get overtired; it’s also a good idea to establish a bedtime routine you can build on when the child is older.

People who aren’t newborns have sleep associations. Your sleep association might be the sound of white noise, reading a bit, having a cup of tea or warm milk, your blanket, or your partner on the other side of the bed. If your sleep association isn’t present, you’ll often have a hard time falling asleep. Unlike adults, babies wake up all the time in the night, so they need their sleep associations to fall asleep every time they wake up. If your baby’s sleep association is thirty minutes of being bounced on an exercise ball, then nobody is going to get a lot of sleep. It’s even worse if you, like many parents, rock your baby to sleep and then leave them in the crib. Imagine how you’d feel if you fell asleep in your bedroom, full of your sleep associations, and then suddenly woke up in a crib. You’d probably cry too.

Useful soothing tools to help babies sleep include white noise, swaddling, pacifiers, baby swings, and managing your child’s schedule so they consistently sleep at the same times each day, when they are neither not sleepy nor overtired. These should mostly be phased out by six months; white noise can be used throughout the first year, and schedule management is useful throughout life.

The easiest time to teach a baby to sleep on their own is when they are two to four months old. The second easiest time is right now; it gets harder the older the baby is. Start with bedtime; set yourself up for success by choosing a bedtime when the child is tired but not overtired, going through a quiet and soothing bedtime routine, and making the room be very very dark.

“No-cry” methods (a misnomer; they usually involve some crying) include:

• Providing lots of soothing in ways you can live with that don’t involve you waking up all the time
• Experimenting with seeing if the child will fall asleep on their own if you leave them alone in their crib for ten or twenty minutes.
• Soothing your child fully to sleep using whatever method works best for you, then waking them a little when you put them in bed.
• Gradually weaning your child from whatever you’re doing that helps them fall asleep.

The “cry-it-out” method is basically just leaving your kid in a safe and comfortable place to sleep and then not returning until they fall asleep. The author recommends full extinction (not checking on the child) as a quicker and more effective method, although parents often prefer checking on the child at regular intervals as it seems more loving.

The book also covers night waking, night eating, weaning your child from sleep soothing techniques, common causes of sleep setbacks both medical and nonmedical, and sleep in older children. It’s good. Check it out.

Your Orgasmic Pregnancy: Little Sex Secrets Every Hot Mama Should Know: A pamphlet’s worth of information stretched out into a book through lots and lots of padding, most of it entirely unrelated to sex (did you know that doing prenatal yoga is good for you?). There is some misinformation: the book claims that masochism is entirely off-limits during pregnancy, when in reality many forms of masochism are perfectly safe. It would be really useful if they had spent less time trying to pitch me on prenatal yoga and more time talking to kink-aware obstreticians to provide an actually useful resource. That said, the list of pregnancy sex positions is genuinely useful, and they had several pretty cool ideas for pregnancy-themed roleplay.

Siblings Without Rivalry: How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too: The correct techniques for dealing with sibling rivalry are surprisingly similar to the correct techniques for metamour management. Acknowledge and accept that your partners might have negative feelings about each other, and don’t try to tell them their feelings are wrong or bad. Don’t compare your partners, saying that one is more romantic and the other is funnier. Make it clear that you love each of your partners as unique people with whom you have a unique relationship, and you do not have a hierarchy. Spread your time among them based on your needs (and, in the case of partners, the seriousness of your relationship– presumably it is relatively rare to have a secondary relationship with one’s offspring). If they start arguing with each other, listen to both sides respectfully but don’t get in the middle; leave them to resolve it themselves. However, one advantage of partners is that they are adults and can be generally trusted not to hit each other on the head with a toy truck, while children have no such guarantee.

Instead of dismissing a child’s negative feelings about a sibling, acknowledge the feelings:

• Put the child’s feelings into words (“you’re furious!”).
• Express what the child might wish (“sometimes you want your sibling to go away”).
• Help children channel their feelings into creative or expressive outlets (e.g. art).
• Stop hurtful behavior. Show how angry feelings can be expressed safely. Don’t attack the attacker.

Alternatives to comparing children:

• Acknowledge what you see or feel (“you put away your blocks and your truck. It’s a pleasure to look at this room”) without favorably comparing the child to another child.
• Describe the problem (“you didn’t do your homework”) without unfavorably comparing the child to another child.

Instead of worrying about treating children equally:

• Focus on each child’s individual needs (e.g. give more food to a child that is very hungry).
• Show children how they’re loved uniquely (“in the whole wide world there’s no one else like you’).
• Give time based on the child’s needs (“your sister needs help with tying her shoes right now”).
• Acknowledge the abilities of disabled children.

When one child bullies another:

• Don’t focus on the aggressor. Attend to the injured party.
• Don’t put one child in the role of “bully”. Acknowledge their ability to be kind and control themselves and correct others or the child themself when they describe the child as a bully.
• Don’t put one child in the role of “victim”. Show them how to stand up for themself (“I bet you can make an even scarier face back) and correct others or the child themself when they characterize the child as weak or helpless.

When children are fighting:

1. Acknowledge the children’s anger towards each other.
2. Listen to all sides with respect.
3. Show appreciation for the difficulty of the problem.
4. Express faith in the children’s ability to solve the problem.
5. Leave the room.
6. If the children appear to be hurting each other, describe the situation, set your limit, and separate the children.
7. For recurring or serious problems, you may wish to hold a parent-guided family meeting, in which you hear all sides and their rebuttals, brainstorm solutions as a family, and pick a solution everyone can live with.

Infant Massage: A very annoying amount of this book is devoted to the fallacious argument that cuddling babies is very important for their mental and physical health and therefore you should devote fifteen minutes a day to a massage. To be clear, cuddling babies is very important to their mental and physical health; a baby deprived of cuddles may get sick, have lifelong developmental disabilities, or even die. That is why parents and alloparents feel a natural, instinctive desire to cuddle babies. Outside of very exceptional circumstances– a Romanian orphanage under Ceausescu, a neonatal intensive care unit, or strictly following the advice of a quack parenting book that thinks you should avoid cuddling your child so you can tame their innate sinfulness or avoid rewarding negative behavior– you will instinctively give your baby enough cuddles that they develop properly.

(Note that most neonatal intensive care units practice “kangaroo care,” in which the baby regularly spends skin-to-skin time with the parents, and if your NICU does not you should absolutely throw a fit until they start practicing the standard of care.)

But on the other hand massage is a nice thing to do with your baby, and I have no objection to the instructions, including chapters on adjusting your infant massage for premature babies, babies with special needs, and toddlers. Might be useful for parents who want to try massaging their babies.

—

Fire From Heaven: The first book in Mary Renault’s the Alexander Trilogy, focusing on Alexander’s early life. Much less enjoyable than the Persian Boy, because she keeps interrupting all the gay romance with this boring “battles” stuff. Why are there battles in my book about Alexander the Great? That is definitely not what I am reading the series for. However, the Persian Boy is sadly light on Ptolemy (Alexander’s half-brother and future ruler of Egypt, not the astronomer), who is an absolute delight. And Bagoas is not exactly what one would call a “reliable narrator” about Hephaiston, which means that Fire From Heaven is the only book in the Alexander Trilogy with any amount of Hephaiston content at all, which is tragic, because Hephaiston is the best.

Mary Renault outdoes herself with the extremely euphemistic sex scenes in this one; I actually had to flip back and reread a few pages before I worked out that “some time later a mother fox walked by with her cubs” was Alexander and Hephaiston losing their virginity to each other.

An Apprentice to Elves: I read this series because it provides me with gay Vikings telepathically bonded to wolves. This book is not, in fact, about the gay Viking telepathically bonded to a wolf; it is about his daughter Alfgyfa who is apprenticed to the svartalfar (the elves of the title). I mean, it is a fine book, but I have expectations and they were not met. I did appreciate Fargrimr, who is probably one of my favorite trans male characters in fiction, and his complete incomprehension about why the not!Romans kept calling him a girl. “Uh, I’m obviously a man, have you ever seen a woman be a jarl?” In general, from a worldbuilding perspective, I appreciate a society that has culturally accepted roles for LGBT+ people that are weird. (“Oh, sure, you can be gay, as long as you telepathically bond with a wolf first. Oh, sure, you can be a trans guy as long as you dad needs an heir, but if you have six brothers you’re shit out of luck.”) It just feels more realistic than societies which are completely perfect and accepting and everyone talks like they have a Tumblr.

A Civil Contract: I regret the decade and a half of my life I wasted not reading Georgette Heyer. If you’re the sort of person who has worn out your copy of Pride and Prejudice and mourns that there is only so much Austen in the world, you should pick up this book. The protagonist Adam is in love with Julia, a beautiful but very silly woman. His father dies and he discovers his father has run up enormous gambling debts; the only way to preserve his family fortune is to marry Jenny, a heiress, who is plain and practical and sensible. Naturally he falls in love with Jenny and then takes five chapters to work out that he’s in love with her. It contains all the Austen goodness: a gently mocking and ironic narrative, absolutely ridiculous mothers and fathers, and a truly delightful snarky little sister. Also, at one point there is Serious Dramatic Tension about whether one guy’s investments are going to pay off. It’s great. Highly recommended.

Station Eleven: An excellent post-apocalyptic novel, in which 99% of humanity dies of a pandemic. The protagonists are a traveling theater/music troupe who visit post-apocalyptic settlements and perform Shakespeare and symphonies for them, because (as the slogan on their wagons reads) “survival is insufficient.” Unlike most post-apocalyptic novels I’ve read, the plot does not derail halfway through to be about some group of survivors fighting a war with some other group of survivors. It is consistently about rebuilding civilization all the way through. I never once had to skip past a loving three-page description of someone’s gun. I think this is an excellent decision on the part of the author and more post-apocalyptic novels should follow her example.

When I reached the end of the book I discovered this was actually Literature, because there were discussion questions in the back. In retrospect, this makes sense of the otherwise puzzling decision to devote multiple chapters to a pre-apocalypse boring middle-aged actor having affairs. However, as chapters about boring actors having affairs go, it was fairly tolerable and the rest of the book was very enjoyable.

Uptown Local and Other Interventions: A short story collection by Diane Duane. I particularly enjoyed The Fix (in which Duane actually manages to pull off starting a story with a dream sequence) and Uptown Local (set in the Young Wizards verse; even for the Young Wizards universe, has a particularly high level of the spirit of Secular Solstice). A good book to read if you’re a Duane fan.

The Door Into Fire: I thought it was just a Young Wizards thing that the villain is entropy, but apparently Diane Duane’s grudge against entropy shows up in all her books. Since she used to write for Scooby Doo, does this mean that there’s a long-lost episode where Freddie unmasks the villain and reveals that he is the second law of thermodynamics?

Mostly a fairly bland and forgettable epic fantasy novel, although I appreciated the detail that everyone is bisexual and polyamorous and this is just totally normal. I was bracing myself when a jealousy plotline happened, but it honestly felt like it was written by someone who actually understands how polyamory works and that in a poly context jealousy reflects underlying relationship problems and unmet needs, not the fact that you are in Twoo Wuv.

Warning for people considering starting the series: the last book has literally been delayed longer than I’ve been alive.

Book Post for October

Tags

follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, neil gaiman, neurodivergence, parenting, racism

Creating Your Perfect Family Size: How To Make An Informed Decision About Having A Baby: I hoped that this book would, like, give me information about how many children I should have, but instead it was just a long list of different things people think about when they have kids. You mean people who for religious reasons don’t use birth control generally have a lot of kids? I had no idea!

The Breastfeeding Book: Everything You Need To Know About Breastfeeding Your Child From Birth Through Weaning: I continue to have difficulties reviewing the practical advice in breastfeeding books, on account of I have never breastfed. It is inaccurate about the things breastfeeding books are always inaccurate about (yes, some people can’t produce sufficient milk; no, breastfeeding does not have all those benefits you’re claiming it does; yes, parents should be concerned about the iron levels of their exclusively breastfed six-month-olds). However, I appreciate the Sears’s characteristic kindness and empathy, and I wish their commitment to never making parents feel guilty for being unable to do something would extend to the parent blogosphere. I also really liked the chapter on how non-breastfeeding parents can help with breastfeeding, both through supporting the breastfeeding parent (cleaning, shooing away busybodies, giving them time for themselves) and through nurturing the baby (through babywearing, playing, and singing).

Norse Mythology: Neil Gaiman is always at his best when telling short stories, and this is essentially a collection of short stories, covering the major Norse myths. Grand, heroic, and with a sly sense of humor. Gaiman loves mythology and it shines out from every page of this wonderful book. Excellent for reading out loud.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life: An excellent introduction to the practice of mindfulness meditation. Unfortunately, I only figured out halfway through that it was not actually intended for me, it was intended for mentally well people who want to try meditation, and Jon Kabat-Zinn has a completely different book for us crazies. Oh well.

The New Jim Crow: I feel like I am literally the last person to jump on this bandwagon but THIS IS AN AMAZING BOOK YOU SHOULD READ IT, especially if you have any interest at all in anti-racism and/or libertarianism. I started the book being like “well, mass incarceration is pretty bad, but it seems like a bit much to claim it is literally a racial caste system like Jim Crow” and ended it “welp, I guess mass incarceration is a racial caste system like Jim Crow.”

One point I found particularly insightful was her argument that to end mass incarceration you will need to enlist poor white people and middle-class-and-above black people by explaining to them how ending mass incarceration will benefit them. Poor white people receive the psychological wage of whiteness, which (in our colorblind society) has changed from “I might be poor but at least I’m not an [n word]” to “I might be poor but at least I’m not a criminal.” Middle-class-and-above black people receive benefits such as affirmative action, which ultimately uphold the system by promoting the pretense of colorblindness; if a black man can be President, it must be the fault of individual black people that they keep going to prison. To enlist these groups, a movement to end mass incarceration must explain why it is offering a better deal than the one currently on offer.

I hadn’t realized before how much we cut off people with criminal records from society. People who have committed felonies are not allowed in public housing or to get food stamps. In many states, they can’t vote or serve on juries; in many other states, they can get their right to vote back, but it’s an expensive process with many fees (this is not a poll tax because of reasons). There is massive discrimination against people with criminal records; making it illegal merely shifts the discrimination to black men more generally. Getting a job is often a requirement if you’re on parole. Since various bits of the government don’t talk to each other, people on parole can wind up with literally 100% of their wages being garnished, meaning that licit work is a money-losing proposition. Parolees are also often required not to talk to people with felony records; apparently no one who made this rule thought about the fact that in many neighborhoods a third of adult men have a felony record.Honestly, if I had to put up with all that shit I would probably commit crimes too.

One of the most striking points was the comparison between drunk driving and smoking crack cocaine, both of which were criminalized at about the same time. Drunk driving literally kills people, while smoking crack only rarely harms people other than yourself. The vast majority of people who drive drunk are white men, while crack is usually smoked by black people. Naturally, drunk driving is punished with a misdemeanor conviction, a week or two in jail, mandatory alcohol treatment, maybe your license getting suspended. Smoking crack, conversely, is punished with literally years in prison.

To highlight the scope of the problem: to get the number of people imprisoned down to even 1970s levels, which were already elevated, four out of every five prisoners would need to be released. This would involve perhaps a million people losing their jobs, many of whom are in rural districts that play an outsize role in elections (particularly since imprisoned people count for population size even though they can’t vote).

The argument that gangsta rap is a modern-day minstrel show is interesting. Like minstrel shows, gangsta rap portrays stereotypes of black people aimed at a white audience, although black people often enjoy them in part because it is a major source of black celebrities.

Out of the Darkened Room: When a Parent is Depressed: Protecting the Children and Strengthening the Family: By far the most valuable part of this book for me was the stories about children of depressed parents. Most people who mention that their parents were depressed are people who are fucked up about it. If your dad was depressed for most of your childhood and you’re fine, you don’t generally bring up your dad’s depression very often. But if you were traumatized by it, it comes up a lot. So it’s really easy for depressed people (me) to conclude that depressed people are universally shitty parents who fuck up their kids. And it was really comforting for me to read pages and pages of stories about mentally ill parents whose children were fine. In spite of having a parent who attempted suicide, had manic episodes, or lay in bed all day crying, the kids were happy, got good grades, had friendships, got into good colleges, and generally had perfectly reasonable childhoods.

The steps for parenting well while depressed were:

1. Discussing depression openly with one’s spouse and other loved ones.
2. Learning about depression and resilience.
3. Addressing the children’s needs (for relationships outside the family, success away from home, reflection on and understanding of what they’ve gone through).
4. Planning how to talk to the children.
5. Having a family meeting with the children.
6. Continuing to openly discuss issues of mental illness and the children’s response.

In general, resilient children are realistic about what they’re dealing with (understanding that mental illness will recur and they can recognize it), are aware of and can articulate strategies for offsetting the effects of mental illness on themselves, and believe their actions make a difference and take action based on that understanding.

Note that while the book title says “depression”, it actually covers all mood disorders.

Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child’s True Potential: grrrrrraaaaarrrrrrggghhh

Large sections of this book are not, in fact, “how to help your gifted child with the struggles of being gifted”, but instead “how to help your twice exceptional child with the struggles of being twice exceptional.” That would be great– as a former 2E kid myself I’m all for advice about helping us– except that the authors seem to have no idea that disabled gifted children exist. Clearly, infodumping, impairments in perspective taking, and difficulty making eye contact are just part of being gifted, not a sign that your child has autism at all!

Much of the advice provided in this book seems, to my mind, decent. However, it is interspersed with mind-bogglingly awful advice, particularly on social skills. For example, parents are encouraged to tell children who read at recess that they’re part of the school community (fine) and ignoring community members is rude (what? no it isn’t!). At no point is it mentioned that children might read at recess because they’re being bullied or as a way of managing their emotions during an overstimulating school day. Parents are also told to tell children that correcting teachers who teach incorrect facts is rude (even though it is literally the teacher’s job to teach things that are true). Parents are told to tell children to lie and pretend they like sports even when they don’t to avoid making other children feel bad.

All the goals here are reasonable. Reading at recess is not a very good way of making friends. Correcting the teacher in public is likely not to work as well as talking to them after class. It’s important to be tactful (“sports aren’t really my thing”) instead of blunt and rude (“sports are stupid and boring”). But for children with social impairments (whether subclinical or clinical) it is particularly important to give accurate reasons for your advice. It is not true that you have to hide what you’re interested in to have friends, or that correcting powerful people is always wrong, or that it is rude to ignore people you don’t like or who mistreat you if they happen to be a member of some broadly-defined “community”. While these might cause effective behavior in the short run, in the long run they will cause extremely ineffective behavior: pretending to be someone you’re not, letting your boss make a dumb decision rather than correcting her, tolerating mistreatment or even abuse. With children with social impairments you must tell the truth.

I remain deeply puzzled at the number of times parenting books tell me not to do my children’s homework for them. People, if it has occurred to you to make your kids’ dioramas for them because all the other parents make their kids’ dioramas for them and you don’t want your kid’s to look like it was made by a child (because it was), you are too fucking invested in your kid’s dioramas.

I recommend skipping this book and instead reading Mind in the Making.

Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion: This was an uncomfortable read in the best way; it really challenged a lot of my viewpoints and I’m not sure what I believe. Against Equality is an anthology of essays centered around the claim that LGB rights activism actually winds up reinforcing oppressive institutions: the military, the prison-industrial complex, and marriage. On one hand, I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea that it shouldn’t be particularly high priority to advocate for queers to also be able to commit war crimes, murder brown people, and suffer lifelong trauma. Like, why are you advocating for our full inclusion in doing something that no one should be doing in the first place? And it seems like the resources directed towards gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell could have been directed towards abolishing marriage and giving queer people in poverty more non-shooting-related options so the military isn’t their only way out. (Also, HIV healthcare access. The state of access to HIV-related health care is a disgrace.)

On the other hand, there is no requirement that every queer in the world agree with the political opinions of me, Ozy. Even if I choose not to donate towards or advocate for queer inclusion in the military, other queer people think joining the military is a noble sacrifice for the sake of their country, and it really isn’t that reasonable for me to object to their activism because of our shared non-normative gender identity. There are actual, practical, material benefits to military and marriage equality: I have friends whose literal physical safety depends on the legality of same-sex marriage. Why are we, the oppressed people, the ones who have to sacrifice for the sake of ending an oppressive institution.? Straight people first! It smacks of privilege, which was an annoying trend throughout this book (particularly when they talked shit about the rich white cis gay boys at the HRC– guys, choosing to become a performance artist does not magically take away your class privilege). Frankly, some of the concerns people have in this book are even more privileged than the ones they’re criticizing: arts funding? Really?

The HRC could quite reasonably object that they are the Campaigning In Favor Of Gay Legal Equality organization and DADT was obviously an example of gay people not being legally equal. While advocating for economic justice, the rights of sex offenders, open borders, and prison reform is great, none of them are gay legal equality, and the HRC should stay within its area of competence. Anyway, the natural extension of “money is better spent on homeless shelters for queer youth than pro-gay-marriage campaigning” is “money is better spent on African public health than on anything even remotely related to queer people,” so you know.

The weakest section is about marriage, partially through no fault of its own (at the time the book was published it was not clear that legal gay marriage would also help improve attitudes towards LGB people in general). The strongest section is about the prison-industrial complex, mostly because it outlines a mechanism through which hate crime laws strengthen prisons (they put people in prison for longer, mandatory minimums are still bad if you’re woke). I’d particularly like to highlight the excellent section on sex offender registries, false accusations of Satanic ritual abuse, and other abuses directed at people accused of being sex offenders.

The Persian Boy: Tragic gay romance novel about Alexander the Great and his extremely Slytherin boyfriend, the Persian eunuch Bagoas. If this summary makes you want to buy the book, you should. Reading the Persian Boy felt somewhat invasive, like someone had taken my id and spread it across the pages for anyone to see; given that I read it for the first time in middle school, this is probably because it made my id.

The Persian Boy is really an absurdly sexy book given that all the sex scenes are like this:

He really wanted love from me. I could not credit such fortune; nobody ever had before. In the past, I had taken pride in giving pleasure, since it was my skill; never had I known what it was to take delight in it. He was not quite so ignorant as I had supposed; it was just that what he knew had been very simple. He was a quick learner, though. All I taught him that night, he thought that by some happy harmony of our souls, we were discovering together. So, indeed, it seemed at last even to me.

(That is the entire scene.)

Like, that is definitely a sexy passage, it’s just that it is missing such normal aspects of sexy passages as “more than ten sentences” and “a reference to genitals” and “literally any idea of what the protagonists are doing.”

Be sure to read the afterword, in which Mary Renault is wonderfully snarky about all her sources.

The Health Hazards of Homosexuality: What The Medical and Psychological Research Reveals: I don’t recommend reading this book but it was definitely worth my ten dollars for the following paragraph–

The name of the website Feministing makes obvious reference to the practice of “fisting” (insertion of one’s hand into a partner’s rectum or vagina). The website’s banner shows a naked female form with hand upraised in the insertion position.

And also this passage, discussing the DSM’s change to the ‘paraphilia’ definitions so they can only be diagnosed if there is impairment in social or vocational functioning or if the patient experiences distress:

(Was the famous coprophiliac Adolf Hitler’s daily functioning impaired due to this practice, or did he continue to hold down his job – at least for a time?)

Also, it seems to me that if you’re going to spend all that time concern-trolling about the children you shouldn’t take creepy photos of teenagers at gay pride and illustrate your book with them. (I mean, did they consent to being in the homophobe book?)

Intersectionality: Key Concepts: I am the sort of person who buys books about intersectionality to read for fun and I was bored by this book. It’s basically all about the definition of intersectionality? Which, okay, fine, there are lots of people who are confused about that point, but surely you could knock out the definition in one chapter and then spend the rest of the time on an intersectional analysis of prison or agriculture or sex or something actually interesting.

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting: Definitely a parenting must-read. Children make parents unhappy: they take away sleep, make it harder to engage in flow (one of the most pleasant human experiences), force you to spend large amounts of time with a person who doesn’t understand niceties like “clothes” and “not screaming,” reduce your freedom, make it harder to advance in your job, and aren’t even that fun– studies consistently show that interacting with children is generally less enjoyable than e.g. folding the laundry. Childrearing particularly tends to worsen marital satisfaction, in part because women tend to do more childcare, especially boring childcare (like toothbrushing, not playing catch) and watching the children while doing other tasks. (Interestingly, fathers experience more work/life conflict than mothers, perhaps because they want to feel like evolved parents.) Childrearing leads to social isolation and lack of sex, neither of which are exactly good for a marriage.

Parents feel like they must engage in “concerted cultivation,” driving their children from extracurricular activity to extracurricular activity, entertaining them when they’re bored, hoping to make them well-rounded adults; this is stressful and unpleasant. If you don’t do this, you feel like a bad parent who is dooming your child to never get into college and who will probably get kidnapped when you tell them to go play in the front yard. In the American colonial era, children made an economic contribution to the household from a fairly young age (even five-year-olds can pick weeds) and were mostly ignored before then. Now children are useless from a family perspective; their work is about improving themselves. The new uselessness of children is particularly grating on adolescents, who developmentally want to start contributing to society. This is part of the reason why parenting adolescents makes people really really unhappy. (Another part is that they keep getting into stupid fights about their children’s hair or music taste. Parents of adolescents: the research suggests you will be a lot happier if you commit not to fight with your child about anything other than issues of morality or safety, on which adolescents are generally much more likely to listen to their parents.)

Then why do we raise kids? (Other than a combination of ignorance, optimism, and the fact that in most states one cannot drop the child off at a safe haven once they are older than a few weeks.) Young children can yank parents out of their preoccupations, inhibitions and routines, allowing them to be more present in the moment rather than wrapped up in their anxieties and achievements. Young children can connect you to the physical world and encourage you to ask deep questions. And they offer an opportunity to give love without any return. While the experiencing self typically doesn’t enjoy parenting, the remembering self does; our relationships with our children are among the most important relationships in our lives, and being a parent consistently increases one’s sense of meaning. In the stories people tell about themselves, being a parent plays an important role.

Distinctions Between Natalism Positions

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ozy blog post, parenting, utilitarianism it works bitches

I have noticed that several distinct positions tend to be collapsed into two positions, “pro-natalism” and “anti-natalism”. I think discussions about natalism would work better if people made more distinctions.

When I searched for information on it I found that people had previously made a distinction between global and local anti-natalism, where local anti-natalism holds that at least some people shouldn’t reproduce and global anti-natalism holds that everyone shouldn’t reproduce. I feel this is not a very satisfactory division; for one thing, I’m not sure if there is anyone who isn’t a local anti-natalist by this taxonomy.

So here are my proposed replacements:

Very strong anti-natalism. It is morally wrong to have children. The human race should slowly go extinct. For example: Human beings cause irreversible harm to the biosphere, which is intrinsically valuable. It is possible to harm a person by creating them but not to benefit them (nonexistent people are not harmed by being deprived of good things), so bringing people into existence is always a great harm to them.

Strong anti-natalism. In general, people should not have children; there are a very few exceptions. For example: Most human lives, even in the developed world, are not worth living and unless you have a strong reason to suspect your child’s life would be worth living, it is wrong to have a child.

Weak anti-natalism. People should err on the side of having children less than they currently do. For example: Raising children is a waste of resources that are better spent improving the lives of already existing people. Most people don’t enjoy interacting with children, and having children tends to worsen marriages and make people more stressed and unhappy (please note that while the first few chapters of this book are anti-natalist, overall the book comes to a pro-natalist conclusion). It would be easier to solve environmental problems if there were fewer humans.

Natalism neutrality. It is difficult to make general conclusions about whether people should have children. Some people should err on the side of having more children than they currently are, while other people should err on the side of having fewer children. For example: many traits are genetic and only people with desirable traits should have children. Many people who would be good parents have few or no children, while many people who are really crappy parents have children anyway.

Weak pro-natalism. People should err on the side of having children more than they currently do. For example: the effort of parenting is upfront while the good parts are later in life, and many people parent in a way that makes them stressed and unhappy and thus have an inaccurate idea of how pleasant parenting can be. We need more people to support our aging population; the more people there are, the fewer taxes people have to pay to provide public goods such as scientific research, weather forecasting, and military defense (which do not increase in cost when the population increases), and all else equal the lower the per capita national debt.

Strong pro-natalism. In general, people should have children; it is morally wrong not to do so. For example: most people’s lives are happy, and creating happy people is a great good, one of the greatest benefits you can provide a person. The purpose of human life from an evolutionary perspective is to reproduce, and people should obey their evolutionary imperatives.

Very strong pro-natalism. It is morally wrong not to have children (except perhaps in a handful of extreme cases). For example: Some Quiverfull belief systems. A philosophy in which prospective people with net-positive lives are harmed by not being created and therefore we should create as many of them as possible. Some variants of total utilitarianism.

I am personally natalism neutral, although weakly pro-natalism for people sufficiently similar to me, and strongly anti-natalist for farmed animals. (I do not think there is sufficient evidence to be anything but agnostic on wild animal natalism.)