Thoughts Concerning Homeschooling

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting, this is a prussian education system hateblog

I.

I have much stronger opinions about the best way to educate the children I am likely to have than I do about the best way to educate children in general. However, I understand that an educational reform proposal is an important part of being a prospective homeschooling parent who also blogs, and luckily there do seem to be some obvious pieces of low-hanging fruit. Picking these can justify the effort of homeschooling in and of itself.

For instance, high schools, and to a lesser extent middle schools, should run on Silicon Valley time. There is absolutely no reason to start classes before 10, much less at 7am (!!!), as the public high school near where I grew up did. Teenagers like to go to sleep at 11am or midnight, this is an extremely predictable fact about teenagers, and you do not get millions of people to change their preferences by yelling at them to be more virtuous and have more willpower. Chronic sleep deprivation causes depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, poor memory, and poor concentration (interestingly, these are all common complaints about teenagers). And I shudder to think of the consequences of causing chronic sleep deprivation in such a crucial time for brain development. Please, for the love of god, homeschooling parents, let your teenagers sleep in.

Similarly, many schools have cut recess and physical education to create more time for academics, in spite of the evidence that exercise improves children’s academic outcomes (as well as, obviously, their physical health). Again, this is another easy fix: homeschooling parents can and should ensure that their children have sufficient time for physical activity, including plenty of time for unstructured free play. On a related note, play-based kindergartens appear to outperform academically oriented kindergartens.

The homeschooling parent may also be able to adopt some evidence-based learning techniques which are not necessarily common in the classroom. The two techniques with the most evidence are practice testing and distributed practice (also called spaced repetition). People seem to learn better if they regularly have to recall the information they’re supposed to be learning, such as by using flashcards, doing practice problems, or having to write a short essay without referencing your notes. Distributed practice/spaced repetition is spreading out what you’re learning over time: for instance, instead of teaching about the theory of evolution all in one week, spread out the lessons over several weeks, and regularly return to the concepts to review them. Promising techniques with less evidence include interleaved practice (mixing up problems of different kinds, such as having addition and subtraction problems on the same worksheet), elaborative interrogation (trying to explain to yourself why facts are true), and self-explanation (explaining to yourself why you solved a problem in a particular way or how a fact relates to other facts you already know).

While there’s not much the non-homeschooling parent can do about their teenager’s chronic sleep deprivation, non-homeschooling parents can also pick these low-hanging fruit, although with somewhat more difficulty. Prioritize physical activity and unstructured play in choosing your child’s after-school activities, flee any kindergarten which involves a worksheet, and teach your child to test themselves and spread out their studying over time. Also, if you find yourself interested in activism, please consider campaigning for your child’s high school to start at a reasonable hour.

II.

An interesting question is whether homeschooling tends to outperform non-homeschooling. Unfortunately, most of the data that purports to show that it does is selection bias hell, overrepresenting wealthy and college-educated homeschooling parents and underrepresenting educationally neglectful or just generally shitty homeschooling parents.

However, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education has done some very important– albeit preliminary– research with fewer selection bias issues. (Interested readers may fund less preliminary research here.) Poor homeschoolers tend to outperform poor publicly schooled children in reading and writing and slightly underperform them in math. Non-poor homeschoolers tend to slightly underperform in reading and writing and massively underperform in math.

We don’t have enough information to know for certain why homeschoolers and non-homeschoolers differ. However, my speculation is that poor homeschoolers tend to do better because poor homeschoolers are different from poor non-homeschoolers: for instance, they may be more likely to be culturally and educationally middle-class people who are poor because one parent quit their job to homeschool. The lower performance of children in math seems to me to be a result of the average American’s attitude towards math, namely, hatred, fear, and distrust. Many Americans can barely perform elementary-school-level math, such as simplifying fractions. No doubt this is due to American schools’ appalling math education, but one would not expect high-quality reading education from a parent who struggles reading Goosebumps, and one should not expect high-quality math education from a parent who does not know algebra.

For this reason, I would advise the homeschooling parent to put serious thought into how they’ll teach mathematics. In my case, I’m not particularly worried, because my local homeschooling coop is going to include an absurd number of physics majors, a former math tutor, and an Ivy League mathematics PhD. However, people who are less lucky should consider budgeting some money for math tutoring, perhaps from a local grad student, or a high-quality after-school math program.

III.

I currently favor unschooling as a method of homeschooling, but this is pretty much about traits of my child, rather than traits of children in general. It is pretty much inevitable– given genetics– that any children I have will have their own particular, passionate interests which they are extremely enthusiastic about learning about, and that they will respond to attempts to get them to learn about other topics with something between dutifulness and rebellion. This seems to me to imply that unschooling, which involves following the child’s interests, is an ideal choice: the children will be much happier and I won’t have to spend a bunch of time coercing them into doing well on tests on subjects they are uninterested in.

No doubt this will lead the child to have a remarkably unbalanced education: they may understand everything there is to know about sailing, or Broadway musicals, or ancient Greece, while remaining unclear on things like how molecules work or the Civil War. However, conventionally educated people are also generally unclear on these things: for instance, 19% of college students know what the Manhattan Project is, 16% know that the Raven in the poem of the same name says “Nevermore,” and 14% know that Mendel is the man who first studied genetic inheritance in plants. (In the interests of not presenting an unfairly biased list, I will add that college students are generally extremely accurate about the definitions of the words “zebra,” “hibernation,” “hockey puck,” “fossil,” and “ruby.” So science education at least is not a total failure.) It is a commonplace observation that most people go through twelve years of mathematical and scientific education, and graduate with no ability to do anything beyond arithmetic and only the vaguest understanding of Newton’s laws or the theory of evolution. If my children are ignorant about Edgar Allen Poe, at least they will have a firm understanding of ancient Greece, which is more than can be said for the general public.

In addition, one does not have unlimited time to educate children: you can either give them a broad overview of many topics or a deep understanding of a few topics. You can have a world history class which gives two days to Sumeria and one day to the Vietnam War, or you can have a Sumerian history class that doesn’t talk about anything else. It’s not obvious to me that the former is obviously better than the latter, and the difficulty of coercing children whose brains work the way mine does leads one inevitably to the latter.

Perhaps the most important part of unschooling is not what it does but what it doesn’t do: that is, unschooling does not crush the love of learning out of children. Peter Gray writes in Free to Learn that adults who attended Sudbury schools as children are often behind in academic knowledge, but they catch up quite quickly once they go to college. And they are routinely baffled by other college students: these college students are paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn from experts in the field, and yet their primary interest is doing the minimum they can to get an A. It was simply incomprehensible to them.

It seems to me that mandatory schooling is likely to reduce the love of learning, because you will regularly have to learn about things you don’t care about and aren’t interested in, and if you are interested in a subject you cannot explore it in as much depth as you would prefer. Extrinsic rewards tend to decrease intrinsic motivation: the more you’re working to get an A in the class, the less you’re working because you actually care about the subject. I’ve personally experienced this– there’s nothing that kills my motivation to write five-thousand word essays about feminism than getting a grade on it.

However, I do think there is a certain amount of wisdom in the three R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic, one that overcomes my objections to coercion. Reading, writing, and arithmetic (plus statistics) are unique among subjects in that they make it easier to learn everything else. While there are other subjects that make everything else easier to learn, they generally only require a few days’ worth of explicit education (the scientific method) or are related to so many different interests that there’s not much reason to explicitly teach it as its own thing (the ability to smell bullshit).

You could also add “a foreign language” to the list of things that make it easier to learn other things, and I certainly would if my children were not native English speakers. However, teaching a foreign language such that the child actually learns it is an enormous pain unless you happen to already have lots of friends who are fluent speakers, and there doesn’t seem to me to be much point in replicating the standard American four-years-of-high-school-Spanish-and-can’t-ask-where-the-bathroom-is. However, if you happen to know lots of people who fluently speak Spanish, Chinese, or a similarly useful language, it seems well-advised to ask them to babysit regularly and refuse to speak any language other than the one you want your child to learn.

Of reading, writing, arithmetic, and a useful foreign language, reading is the most important: while writing is primarily useful if you want to communicate something, and math is useful for the natural and social sciences but generally unnecessary for the humanities, literally everything you want to know– from cooking to woodworking to economics to the history of the Indus valley civilization– is easier to learn if you are capable of reading a reference text.

The good news is that all pretty much all unschooled children learn to read eventually, on average at the age of 8, which is only one year behind most children. (Note, however, the caveats above about self-reported data: this evidence is likely to massively overstate how early unschoolers are reading.) The bad news is that nearly a fifth of unschooling children learn to read after the age of 10, which means that they have at best three to four years of fundamentally impaired ability to learn, and perhaps almost a decade. Imagine what they could have accomplished in those three to four years with appropriate reading education!

Some unschooling advocates point to hunter-gatherer societies, in which children often learn solely through play. However, the games hunter-gatherer children play have undergone literal millennia of cultural evolution to make sure they teach the skills hunter-gatherer children need to learn. This is not true for modern children; our games are not generally optimized for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. For that reason, I suggest using Montessori methods in the early grades, which are play-based.

IV.

Both my family and my husband’s family have a disproportionate number of weird, awkward nerds. Having no social skills is deeply unpleasant: it feels like you are surrounded by incomprehensible monsters who hate you for no reason, perhaps because they are evil, perhaps because you are an inherently terrible person. For this reason, it makes sense to prioritize teaching social skills.

However, explicitly teaching social skills often goes poorly. For one thing, social skills classes are often based more on what parents and teachers want to be true than on what is actually true: for instance, students will be told to tell bullies firmly that they don’t like that, but will not be told to punch the bully or, failing that, befriend someone tough who can punch the bully for you, even though the latter are far more effective techniques. Sometimes students are even told that sitting quietly in class and doing your homework will make you friends. For this reason, I suggest avoiding social skills classes.

I am currently moderately socially competent. When I think about how I became moderately socially competent, two things stand out. One is that I began communicating online, which stripped away the incomprehensible tone and body language and allowed me to quietly observe interactions for months before I participated myself. For this reason, I plan to encourage my children to engage in online interaction.

The second is that online I could talk to people whose neurotypes (for lack of a better word) were similar to mine. (This is not about diagnoses: there are many autistic people I can’t relate to with anything other than polite incomprehension; weird awkward nerds can have a wide variety of different diagnoses and often do not qualify for any diagnosis at all, except perhaps recurring depression.) I don’t think people often think about how important the typical mind fallacy is in developing cognitive empathy, particularly when you are first learning. The first step to cognitive empathy is going “I would be sad if I lost my doll, she lost her doll, so she is probably sad.” Only once you have a firm grasp of that can you move onto “I would be sad if I lost something important to me, I don’t care about tea sets, she cares about her tea set, she lost her tea set, so she is probably sad.”

Interacting with people who are very different from you is interaction on hard mode. We normally place children with social-skills impairments in environments where reasoning based on their own minds is utterly useless. If you like listening to other people’s infodumps, you might infodump about your own interests and then be puzzled about why no one likes you. If you misunderstand subtext, you might politely decide to be blunt about whether you like another child’s haircut. If you don’t care about hygiene, you might be confused about why the other children make fun of you for wearing the same pants three days in a row. Weird awkward nerds are probably different from other children in other ways: for instance, they tend to have different interests, which makes it hard to bond over shared passions or hobbies. The situation is even worse for autistic children, who not only have all these difficulties but also have a characteristic affect (stimming, lack of eye contact) which is unpleasant for most neurotypicals. So you put children who are already bad at social interaction in a situation where they have to do very complicated social reasoning and they don’t share many interests with the children they’re talking to and the other children are already biased towards disliking them. This is a recipe for disaster.

It seems to me a better way would be to put weird awkward nerdy children in an environment of solely weird awkward nerdy children. As young children, they can learn empathy, confidence, and how to make friends around people like them. Once they’re a bit older, they can interact with ordinary children and children who are differently socially impaired, and learn how to expand their empathy to people who are more different from them: since they already have friends, their failures won’t make them feel like they are inherently unlikeable and alien, and perhaps they can compare notes with their friends and together learn to understand more normal people. Autistic children can learn to fake eye contact and to stim subtly in adolescence, after several years of being allowed to stim freely, and when they aren’t trying to learn all the other rules at the same time. (I do believe that being able to pass is, sadly, a useful skill.)

I guess this is partially an argument against inclusion, even though inclusion has been a big disability rights push for decades. I want to defend myself against this a little bit. A disabled-children-only classroom seems very silly: most disabled children don’t have any sort of social impairment, so this argument doesn’t apply to them. Not all socially impaired children should be put in the same classroom: there are lots of different ways children can be socially impaired, and a socially impaired child may have even more difficulties understanding a differently socially impaired child than they do understanding a child with ordinary social skills. And certainly there is no reason to separate disabled and nondisabled weird awkward nerds.

Like I said, I am not really capable of suggesting strategies for educational reform: I shudder at the idea of turning “weird awkward nerd” into a set of criteria that decides which classroom you get to go into. And I have zero evidence (other than my own personal experience) that suggests this is actually a better way to raise socially impaired children. That said, personally I plan on setting up my homeschooling so that my children mostly interact with similarly weird and awkward children in the elementary-school years, and to me this is the major advantage of being able to homeschool.

 

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Blog Housekeeping

Tags

effective altruism, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, parenting

New secret blog post up, this one about mental illness and parenting.

I generally list where I’m donating in a donations post at the end of the year, but this donation is relatively time-sensitive and if I wait until December anyone who wants to copy me can’t. I have donated $100 to fund a randomized controlled trial of a sepsis treatment which my friend Sarah Constantin finds promising. I think thoughtful, independent research into potentially high-value places to donate is something that the effective altruism community doesn’t do enough of, and I have committed to donating $100 to each such opportunity I come across until I think enough such independent research is being done.

Secret Blog Post on Patreon

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting

People who have subscribed to my Patreon at the $3 and up level, there is a new secret blog post about parenting. Check it out.

Secret blog posts will probably be disproportionately about parenting for the near future, so if that sounds up your alley, $3/month will get you the thing.

You may also notice on the sidebar that you now have the ability to buy my time. Base cost is $20/hour. Tasks people have hired me for so far include getting me to read and critique their writing, hear about their crackpot ideas, give them advice about whether they’re trans, or read a book and write a review of it.

Book Post for March

Tags

csa tw, ozy blog post, parenting, pregnancy cw

Dude, You’re Gonna Be A Dad: All I want is a book I can give to my husband that focuses on his experience of the pregnancy. Instead, I get this sexist pile of bullcrap.

A truly astonishing percentage of this book is devoted to Dealing With Women And Their Incomprehensible Woman Feelings. Of course you, a man, do not have any feelings you need to talk about! You are a manly man! You care about football! And sex! And drinking! The most striking thing about all of this is that it isn’t clear to me that this book expects men to actually get any say in their relationships whatsoever. If you don’t want to go shopping for the birth announcement or participate in a baby shower or go to the doctors’ appointments, why not just say that? Like, first of all, some men like baby showers? And, second of all, if you despise baby showers that much, why not tell your wife? It is just this horrifying vision of a world where people are constantly forced to have their most intimate relationship with someone they can’t talk to and don’t particularly like.

While I too agree that large breasts are very nice, an advice book shouldn’t go hubba hubba about how big one’s wife’s breasts are more than, say, twice. And if your wife is literally producing your child, then it seems to me that you should do your fair share of chores without having to be bribed with sex to do so. And in a pregnancy book, I think it is wildly inappropriate to talk about the process of birth and associated medical procedures as if they are so disgusting men cannot possibly be expected to deal with them. If you can’t handle knowing what an episiotomy is, maybe you shouldn’t have a partner who might get one.

The Book of New Family Traditions: How To Create Great Rituals for Holidays and Everyday: I think that it’s problematic to refer to things as being neurotypical; after all, both neurodivergent and neurotypical people are very diverse, and it’s a mistake to assume that “unlike me” is the same thing as “NT”. Still, this book is aggressively neurotypical. A lot of the things the author considers to be Fun I would consider to be incredibly overstimulating and they would make me want to hide in a corner and cry.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of really cool ideas for holidays and rituals, if you can pick through the ones that wouldn’t work for you. A few I particularly liked: A mom bonded with her son, a college student who liked World of Warcraft, by playing with him, and eventually organized a birthday party for him in WoW with his guild; celebrating A A Milne’s birthday with small children who like Winnie the Pooh; reading a poem each day with your kids during April; a dad who brings his child’s stuffed animal with him on work trips and photographs the stuffed animal doing various fun things; giving a Miss Frizzle Award each month to the family member who has learned the most things through making the most mistakes.

The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting: How The Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal With The Toughest Negotiators You Know– Your Kids: Less a parenting advice book, more an introduction to game theory that happens to use parenting as a hook. Still pretty interesting.

The traditional “I cut, you choose” is provably optimal if there are only two people involved. Traditional turn-taking is often suboptimal because going first is way better than going second: for instance, if you’re picking players on a team. “Balanced alternation” (Alice, Bob, Bob, Alice, Bob, Alice, Alice, Bob) is superior. If children are arguing over something, try an auction! The book recommends chore auctions, because children might have different amounts of money, but it seems to me that “you can’t buy control of the remote control if you’re saving up money for a new bike” is in fact an important economics lesson of its own. Not sure what the best way to deal with older children having larger allowances is, though. If you credibly follow through on threats, it’ll be less likely that you’ll have to follow through on threats. Majority rule works best for voting if there are only two options; if there are more options, Random Dictator (in which a single person is randomly selected to make the decision) is best over time, because families are generally small enough that everyone will be able to take a turn to be dictator.

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way To Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind: The one phrase repeated throughout this book is “connect, then redirect.” Connecting with your child first calms them, improves your relationship, and might improve your child’s brain. To connect with your child, first get below their eye level, then touch them, give them a nod, or otherwise nonverbally communicate your empathy. Acknowledge their feelings verbally, then listen to what your child says, instead of lecturing or trying to convince her not to feel what she feels. Once you’ve listened, reflect back her emotions to her (“you seem really disappointed about not getting to go to the party”). Throughout the process, try to have an attitude of curiosity about why your child is behaving as they are. And don’t catastrophize about what your child’s misbehavior means for the rest of their life.

Wait until both you and your child are calm to redirect; your child is not in a place for learning, and you aren’t in a place for teaching, when either of you is overemotional. (I think they chose “redirect” because it rhymes, because honestly what they’re calling redirection doesn’t seem like redirection to me.) Redirection is inherently flexible: the important thing is not to stick to rules, but instead to ask yourself how best to teach the child what you want them to teach. It’s important to be consistent but not rigid: if the household policy is that homework is done before fun, but the child’s grandparents came over, maybe homework can wait for after dinner.

The skills you probably want to build through discipline are insight into oneself, empathy with others, and the ability to repair harms caused. Therefore, ask the child about his feelings to build insight and about other people’s feelings to build empathy. (It’s important to ask rather than lecturing. As you can no doubt remember from your own childhood, children zone out during lectures.) To build the ability to repair harms, ask the child what they think should happen afterward. You can also ask them for ideas about how to prevent problems in the future. Try neutrally describing situations: “you said you were prepared for the test, but you got a D, what happened?” Always accept your child’s emotions, even as you limit their behavior. Emphasize what you do want your children to do (“put on your shoes”) rather than what you don’t (“stop messing around!”). Whenever possible, say a yes with conditions rather than an outright no: “we can read a story tomorrow night”, not “no more stories.” Playfulness, silliness, and humor can defuse conflicts.

Loose Parts: Inspiring Play In Young Children: The premise of this book is that to encourage freeform play with kids, you should give them toys that can be used in a lot of different ways. This book then proceeds to have pictures of literally every such toy in existence. It is literally 90% picture. I don’t object to pictures per se, and some of the pictures are very prettily shot, but I am a very verbal person who gets bored easily by the umpteenth picture of pinecones.

A random sample of things photographed in the book, to give you an idea: bouncy balls; buckets; boxes; fabric; metal washers; rocks; pipe cleaners; seeds; pots and pans; bottlecaps; colored paper; necklaces.

The Wonder Weeks: The Wonder Weeks claims that whenever your infant is really fussy it is because they are learning a new skill. I have no idea if this is technically speaking “true”, but it certainly sounds hella useful for parents to believe. It is a huge pain in the ass when infants are fussy, but parents like their infants learning new skills, and you can reframe the situation by going “oh yes! She’ll probably be able to lift her head up/talk/walk/whatever soon!” Since infants are constantly learning things, it is a bit hard to prove this framing wrong.

Suggested activities for newborns: lots snuggling.

Suggested activities for week five: lots snuggling; have ‘conversations’ with your baby; show her things she finds interesting.

Suggested activities for week eight: let baby play with her hands and feet, possibly naked, possibly securely tying a ribbon to a hand or foot; chat with baby; bathe with baby; bring baby interesting objects; if the baby can lift her head up, gently pull her up so she’s sitting supported with you. Toys: anything that dangles overhead; anything that can be swiped at or touched; a mobile that moves or is musical; cuddly toys; a music box.

Suggested activities for week twelve: let your baby feel different fabrics; gently bounce the baby; sway baby side to side like a pendulum; slide the baby down your body; lift the baby up slowly above your head then lower her down, perhaps making airplane noises; pretend to nibble the baby; put the baby on your knee and bounce her. Toys: rattles; rocking chairs; dolls with realistic faces; bells; toys that make sounds; wobbly toys that bounce back when hit.

Suggested activities for week nineteen: narrate your life to the baby; look at brightly colored pictures together; sing songs; play peek-a-boo and one-little-piggy; show the baby a mirror; say “I’m going to [dramatic pause] pinch your [body part]” and then do so. Toys: crackly paper; mirror; photographs or pictures of other babies or objects or animals she recognizes by name; CD with children’s songs; toy vehicle with wheels that really turn; screw-top container with rice in it; household items such as a measuring cup or colander in the bath; activity center; ball with gripping notches and a bell inside; plastic or inflatable rattle.

Suggested activities for week 26: peek-a-boo and variations, hiding yourself or her; hide toys under a blanket or in the bathtub; look at picture books together; whisper to her; letting her drop things from her high chair; songs where you move the child as you sing; standing the baby on her head; letting her ‘fly’ around the room; supporting her as she sits or stands; swimming (only if supervised closely); going to a children’s farm together. Toys: a cupboard full of interesting things like empty toilet paper rolls, empty boxes, a pan, keys, and plastic plates; toy pianos; toy telephones; drums; squeaky toys; cuddly toys that make noise when turned upside down; toy cars with rotating wheels and openable doors; things to fill and empty out in the bath; CD with children’s songs; picture books; photo books; wooden blocks; balls; wooden spoons; boxes; empty egg cartons; wooden spoons; cups that nest or stack.

Suggested activities for week 37: taking baby outside; allowing him to press doorbells, flip light switches, etc.; let baby watch himself as you dress or undress him; name things; ask your baby to do things for you like handing you something; patty cake; let baby imitate what you’re doing; put baby in front of a mirror; chase; hide-and-seek (make sure the baby sees you disappear). Toys: things that open and close like doors and drawers; pans with lids; alarm clocks; magazines and newspapers to tear; plastic plates, cups, silverware; cushions and duvets to crawl on and over; boxes and buckets that are larger than he is; toy cars; posters with distinct pictures; picture books; baby pools; blocks, especially if large; sand, water, pebbles, and plastic tools; swings; dolls with realistic faces; things he can move (handles, knobs); things that move by themselves (shadows, branches); containers; balls of all sizes.

Suggested activities for week 46: pattycake; itsy bitsy spider; row row row your boat; let baby ‘help’ you do housework; let baby ‘groom’ himself; let baby feed himself with a spoon; let baby cooperate in dressing himself, and name the parts as you dress him; touch and name parts of your baby’s anatomy; point to and name things; put a toy under a cup and watch him look for it; wrap a plaything in crinkly paper and watch him unwrap it. Toys: toy cars; wooden trains with stations and bridges; drum (or pots and pans!) to beat on; dolls with toy bottles; books with animal pictures; balls of all sizes; giant plastic beads; mirrors; plastic figures of people or animals; primo blocks; bicycles, cars, or trucks he can sit on and move around himself; stuffed animals, especially if it makes music if you squeeze it; sandbox with bucket and spade.

Suggested activities for week 55: give the doll a bath; let the baby help unpack groceries, do dishes, or do other housework; hide an object that’s playing a sound and let the baby find it; put a toy under one cup, switch the locations of the cups, and let him find it. Toys: dolls with strollers and beds; farmhouse with farm animals and fences; tea set (unbreakable); wooden train with tracks; cars and garage; pots, pans, and wooden spoons; telephone; Primo blocks; bicycle, car, toy horse, or engine he can sit on; push-along wagon; rocking horse; stackable containers; rod with stackable rings; colored sponges; box with differently shaped blocks and holes; mop, hand broom, dustpan and brush; large sheets of paper and markers; books with animals or cars and tractors; musical instruments; CD with simple stories.

Suggested activities for week 64: various physical antics; playing outdoors; asking the child to point to objects or body parts; movement songs like Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes or If You’re Happy and You Know It; silliness; cartoons like Sesame Street; peek-a-boo; hide-and-seek; ‘helping’ cook, vacuum, or do the dishes, or pretending ot do so. Toys: jungle gym and slide; balls; books; sandbox; tea set; puzzles; plastic bottles; cleaning utensils; toy vacuums; toys on a string; Sesame Street; cartoons.

Suggested activities for week 75: silliness; play wrestling and other physical play; drawing; trying to stand on his head or balance on one foot; drawing; blowing bubbles; jumping; balancing on a short wall; tickling; playing outside; playing with other children; ball games; ghost games; twirling around until dizzy; feeding the dog; tag; hide-and-seek; reading stories. Toys: cars and garage; clay; children’s TV; children’s books; trinkets that belong together; toy airport; drawing on paper; sand and water; push car; plastic chair; ball; bicycle; stuffed animals, dolls, teddy bears; stickers; sandbox; digging in the yard; Sesame Street; music; slide; colored pencils; blowing bubbles; trains; swings; rocking horse; puzzles.

Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?: The Surprising Science of Pregnancy: This cites a lot of psychological experiments that have that sort of “gee whiz” quality that makes me think they’ll fail to replicate. Many of the cited studies are on rats, and things that apply to rat babies have a remarkable tendency to not generalize to human babies. She also cites Satoshi Kanazawa, He Who Gives All Other Evolutionary Psychologists A Bad Name. So if you’re looking for a science-based pregnancy I’d recommend Debunking the Bump or Expecting Better and skipping this one.

Anyway, the actionable advice from this book is as follows:

• Don’t eat food that makes you feel nauseous in early pregnancy.
• The expectant father may get mood swings, nausea, fatigue, food cravings or aversions, or bloat; if so, rejoice, as this is a sign of attachment and emotional responsiveness to the baby. (Also, now he gets to suffer as much as you do.)
• Eat a generally healthy diet: leafy greens, eggs, fruit, fish, nuts, beans, whole grains, soy, and a little fat and dairy, but not to excess.
• In particular: Eat fish.
• Avoid consuming an excessive amount of vitamins.
• Gain between twenty-five and thirty-five pounds.
• Have sex.
• Tell the father the baby looks like him, even if it doesn’t.
• Read books to and play music to the baby in utero; they will find those books and music comforting when they leave.
• Moderate stress and exercise are good for the fetus, but high levels of stress and exercise are bad.
• Eat a chocolate bar each day.
• Squat during childbirth if you can.
• Stimulate your breasts to induce labor.
• Spend the first hour after birth with the baby pressed against your chest.
• Don’t bathe right after childbirth.
• Get ample support during childbirth.
• Take pictures of your baby’s smiling face and then look at it as often as possible.
• Give your baby ample love and nurturing, even to the point of spoiling her.
• Breast-feed.
• While breast-feeding, try to have moderate stress in your life.

No Regrets Parenting: Turning Long Days and Short Years Into Cherished Moments With Your Kids: No Regrets Parenting consists mostly of a series of ideas about how to spend time with your children if you are a busy person, as many parents are. For instance, you can host sleepovers; if you’re working weekends, you can take your kids to the office with you and let them play at the office. To bond with a teenager, you can teach them to drive and then help them apply to college. You can have family traditions, like a taco night and family movie night. You can have family dinners together every night. Most of the suggestions are not particularly groundbreaking, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.

Playful Parenting: An Exciting New Approach To Raising Children That Will Help You Nurture Close Connections, Solve Behavioral Problems, and Encourage Confidence: Based on the author’s experience as a father and play therapist, this is an extensive guide to playing with children. I find it extraordinarily reassuring that there are how-to books for these things.

Playful Parenting argues that children’s misbehavior is often caused by disconnection, and creating a sense of connection can cause them to behave better. The best way to do this is through the language of children– play. Play also allows children to work through their feelings and conflicts in their lives. We may stigmatize certain kinds of play– disapproving of roughhousing, violent play, or play we deem sexist. But these allow kids to feel a sense of connection and work through their feelings too: for instance, wrestling can allow kids to explore themes of aggression, anger, isolation, or strength. So try to respect your children’s play and engage in it wholeheartedly. For instance, the author played Barbies reluctantly with his daughter, thinking that they were boring and stupid and sexist, before he realized that this was basically saying to his daughter “your interests are boring and stupid and sexist.” He then played with more enthusiasm. The author suggests that wrestling and other physical play are excellent ways to engage with kids, as is pretending to be stupid (for instance, putting a sock on your head, then on your hand, then on your shoulder, before you put it on your foot). Play can stop misbehavior in its tracks by turning the misbehavior into a game.

[content warning: child sexual abuse]

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex: A must-read for any sex-positive American. Levine’s thesis is that, as a culture, Americans are hysterical about the sexuality of minors, and this causes a great deal of harm. Although her book is nearly fifteen years old, the trends she discusses have not changed as far as I can tell.

For instance, consider child on child sexual abuse. Although child on child sexual abuse is a real thing (and one of my few critiques of Levine’s book is that I think she fails to engage with the harm it can cause), social workers and scholars have concluded without evidence that sexual play and ordinary roughhousing are really sexual abuse. Sexual play might not be “just curiosity”– many children experience sexual pleasure, which they may wish to consensually explore with other children. We simply do not have enough information to know what is normal and what is abnormal sexual play, as well as whether abnormal but consensual sexual play causes any harm. In the absence of this evidence, children are being branded as sexual offenders and placed in treatment that is far more appropriate to actual abusers (for instance, it characterizes the child’s insistence that they have not done anything wrong as “denial”).

Even if it’s not branded as child-on-child sexual abuse, Levine points out that our attitude towards children’s sexuality is fucked up in a lot of different ways. For instance, she describes a parenting advice columnist who, when asked what to do when the parent catches two five-year-old boys looking at and touching each other’s penises, says to tell them there’s nothing wrong with their bodies but that their bodies are private so they shouldn’t show them to each other. Levine asks, “surely, if we want to teach our children about privacy, the correct thing to do would be to say ‘excuse me’ and close the door?” There is simply no concept that children might have privacy from parents or the ability to make decisions about their own bodies.

The situation is worse for teenagers, who pretty much always want sex more than children do. Levine’s criticisms of abstinence-only education are familiar, but she goes farther than that. Levine questions the usefulness of statutory rape law, pointing out that the line is drawn differently in different places, and yet most Americans don’t even know whether their state is a sex-under-eighteen-is-illegal state or a sex-under-sixteen-is-illegal state. She points out that many adults who had sex with adults as teenagers consider it a positive experience, and essentially no one considers actual rape to be a positive experience. And getting the courts involved can worsen an already bad situation.

Levine argues that teenagers should generally be expected to engage in outercourse, rather than intercourse. However, even comprehensive sex education (Levine calls it “abstinence-plus”) provides little to no education about what outercourse might mean, almost never mentioning such activities as phone sex, sharing porn, frottage, or use of sex toys. Many people condemn cybersex, even though it’s objectively speaking the safest form of sex a teenager might engage in: there’s no STI or pregnancy risk, and real life doesn’t come with a block function. But cybersex combines the terrifying Teen Sexuality with the terrifying Internet, so it’s doomed.

The Fed Is Best Foundation Encourages Mommy Guilt Through Bad Science

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting

Several skeptical parenting blogs I read have talked about the Fed is Best Foundation. The Fed is Best Foundation advocates for greater awareness of women who can’t produce adequate milk and fights against overzealous pushing of breastfeeding.

Of course, I agree that many breastfeeding advocates have gone beyond the science in pushing the benefits of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding has small but clear health benefits in the first year of life, and may increase your child’s IQ; all other alleged “benefits” have not been shown to be true by high-quality evidence. Babies can be raised to happy, thriving adulthood on formula, breastmilk, or a combination. Support for breastfeeding parents must never pass into pressure to breastfeed– particularly for women who, for medical reasons, are incapable of producing enough milk. Guilt about not breastfeeding is entirely unjustified and it is wrong for people to make formula-feeding mothers feel guilty.

However, the Fed is Best Foundation goes beyond the science as well.

In the open letter explaining her position, Dr. del Castillo-Hegyi, the founder of the Fed is Best Foundation, writes:

My son was born 8 pounds and 11 ounces after a healthy pregnancy and normal uneventful vaginal delivery.  He was placed directly on my chest and was nursed immediately.  He was nursed on demand for 20-30 minutes every 3 hours.  Each day of our stay in the hospital, he was seen by the pediatrician as well as the lactation consultant who noted that he had a perfect latch.  He produced the expected number of wet and dirty diapers.  He was noted to be jaundiced by the second day of life and had a transcutaneous bilirubin of 8.9.  We were discharged at 48 hours at 5% weight loss with next-day follow-up.  We were told by the lactation consultant before discharge that he would be hungry and we were instructed to just keep putting him on the breast.  Upon getting home, he became fussy and I nursed him longer and longer into the night.  He cried even after nursing and latched back on immediately.  He did not sleep.  By the next morning, he stopped crying and was quiet.  We saw our pediatrician at around 68 hours of life (end of day 3).  Despite producing the expected number of wet and dirty diapers, he had lost 1 pound 5 ounces, about 15% of his birth weight. At the time, we were not aware of and were not told the percentage lost, and having been up all night long trying to feed a hungry baby, we were too exhausted to figure out that this was an incredible amount of weight loss.  He was jaundiced but no bilirubin was checked.  Our pediatrician told us that we had the option of either feeding formula or waiting for my milk to come in at day 4 or 5 of life.  Wanting badly to succeed in breastfeeding him, we went another day unsuccessfully breastfeeding and went to a lactation consultant the next day who weighed his feeding and discovered that he was getting absolutely no milk.  When I pumped and manually expressed, I realized I produced nothing. I imagined the four days of torture he experienced and how 2 days of near-continuous breastfeeding encouraged by breastfeeding manuals was a sign of this. We fed him formula after that visit and he finally fell asleep. Three hours later, we found him unresponsive. We forced milk into his mouth, which made him more alert, but then he seized. We rushed him to the emergency room. He had a barely normal glucose (50 mg/dL), a severe form of dehydration called hypernatremia (157 mEq/L) and severe jaundice (bilirubin 24 mg/dL).  We were reassured that he would be fine, but having done newborn brain injury research, knowing how little time it takes for brain cells to die due to hypoglycemia and severe dehydration, I did not believe it, although I hoped it.

At 3 years and 8 months, our son was diagnosed with severe language impairment, autism, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, low IQ, fine and gross motor delays.  He was later diagnosed with a seizure disorder associated with injury to the language area of the brain.

By implication, of course, del Castillo-Hegyi’s son’s hypernatremic dehydration caused his autism.

Of course, there is absolutely no evidence that delayed feeding causes intellectual or developmental disability. No one has ever done an actual peer-reviewed study. Circumstantial evidence suggests that it probably doesn’t: as mentioned above, a randomized controlled trial found that increased breastfeeding increases IQ, and breastfeeding appears to reduce the rates of autism or have no effect on it, depending on the study. This would be very very strange if, as the Fed is Best Foundation suggests, delayed feeding is putting thousands of children at risk of developing an intellectual or developmental disability.

When a child gets diagnosed with an intellectual or developmental disability, particularly one like autism, where the causes are poorly understood, many parents search for a reason why this happened to them. Many, in desperation, latch upon pseudoscience like mercury poisoning or vaccines. del Castillo-Hegyi is the latest in a long line of autism parents to comfort themselves with etiologies that aren’t backed up by the facts, although I guess at least she’s creative.

Skeptic parenting blogs would never ever run an article by an autism parent claiming that their child got a vaccine, then got autism, and therefore we shouldn’t be giving babies vaccines. Why is it acceptable to run an article by an autism parent claiming that her child was dehydrated, then got autism, and therefore we should be encouraging fewer women to exclusively breastfeed?

del Castillo-Hegyi fails to present the evidence in a remotely balanced way. In her discussion of transient newborn hypoglycemia, del Castillo-Hegyi dishonestly presents statistics from a study of high-risk infants as if they were from the general population. She also cites a single study in which transient infant hypoglycemia is linked to worse performance on fourth grade achievement tests, failing to note that the study itself says it goes against expert opinion and that policy should not be changed until the study is further validated. She points out that exclusive breastfeeding leads to an elevenfold increase in rehospitalization for dehydration, without mentioning that hospitalization for dehydration is not very common to begin with and that serious sequelae of dehydration are rare. (Modern medicine is awesome.)

Again: this is the exact quality of evidence that lead lactivists to make inflated and inaccurate claims about the benefits of breastfeeding. Skeptic parenting blogs quite rightly call lactivists out on making claims that aren’t backed up by the evidence. Why do they turn around and promote a woman who so distorts the evidence on exclusive breastfeeding?

Unfortunately, the Fed is Best Foundation’s tendency to favor emotional manipulation over statistics does not stop at that essay. Consider this recent blog post, If I Had Given Him Just One Bottle He Would Still Be Alive. I empathize with the author; the death of a child is one of the worst experiences anyone can go through. I understand that her grief makes her want to help other parents not suffer like she did.

Of course, no doubt a similar grief is felt by the mother whose baby died of cronobacter infection from contaminated formula. Or the father whose baby died when he propped the bottle and fell asleep, allowing his baby to choke. Or the many parents whose children died of sudden infant death syndrome, the risk of which may be reduced by breastfeeding. (Unfortunately, I am not aware of a randomized controlled trial or sibling study which examines the effects of breastfeeding on SIDS, and thus have to use lower-quality evidence which may overestimate the effects of breastfeeding.)

This is why we cannot rely on single cases, however much they tug at our heartstrings. In a world of seven billion people, something with a one in a million chance will affect seven thousand people, which is enough for as many heart-wrenching stories as you please.

I was not able to find exact numbers about how many babies die of dehydration in developed countries each year. In the United States, dehydration is not one of the top ten causes of infant death, which collectively account for seven out of ten infant deaths. About 0.4% of hospitalized newborns in a Scottish study were hospitalized for hypernatremic dehydration, suggesting that it is fairly uncommon. I also note the study cited above which says that serious sequelae of dehydration are rare; death is, presumably, a serious sequela. My guess is, therefore, that as tragic as her child’s death of dehydration is, the mother who wrote that article can comfort herself that very few other children will suffer a similar fate.

I empathize with this mother, who feels tremendous guilt. Her child appeared healthy except for crying a lot, and then turned out to be seriously ill in a way no one could have predicted. But her guilt is irrational: most babies who cry a lot do not turn out to have a fatal health condition. And we should not prey on the irrational guilt of mothers who have suffered tragedies to feed the guilt of other parents.

Many parents feel irrational guilt about their parenting choices, and of course I support alleviating that guilt. And there are a lot of people telling lies about how parenting works, and parents need evidence-based guidance to cut through the bullshit. But you don’t magically join the side of Yay Evidence, Boo Guilt the second you say something nice about formula.

Instead, you join the side of Yay Evidence, Boo Guilt if you nonjudgmentally and calmly give parents enough information to make their own decisions based on their own values, paying attention to the quality of evidence and base rates and so on. You need to completely avoid misrepresenting studies and claiming that things cause autism when they don’t. Your posts should contain things like “numbers” and should not contain things like “horrible stories about babies dying of dehydration which will cause every prospective parent reading it to panic that THEY ARE GOING TO MURDER THEIR BABY WITH BREASTFEEDING.”

Unfortunately, the Fed is Best Foundation appears slightly confused about these things. But in the meantime actual skeptics can avoid citing them like they’re not science deniers who happen to be wearing a different team jersey color.

Book Post for February, Part Two: Books About Parenting

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting, this is a prussian education system hateblog

Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform On Your Kid: Exactly what it says on the tin! If you would like to replicate a bunch of developmental psychology experiments on infants with your very own infant, this book will explain to you how! All the experiments were selected for being easily doable in the home and posing no risk to the child. Important note: buy a copy while you’re pregnant, as many of the experiments are best performed on newborns.

The Baby Book: Since there is very little evidence about most decisions parents make about babies, I feel perfectly free to make my decision based on my own preferences and values. Attachment parenting, I think, is in line with my values: it hews closely to the way people raised children in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness; it emphasizes closeness and support; it doesn’t involve letting your child cry it out, which personally I feel like would make my heart shatter in two. Whether or not Dr. Sears’s advice is right for most people, I definitely think it’s right for me.

I don’t understand why the attachment parenting blogosphere is such a cesspit. Dr. Sears emphasizes that the most important thing any baby needs is happy parents and that parents know their own baby best, so if advice goes against your own parental intuition throw out the advice. Even the much-despised advice about being a stay-at-home mother is primarily motivated by concern for the mother: raising a baby is very stressful and combining it with a full-time job can make moms miserable and unable to enjoy their babies. I think Dr. Sears both doesn’t think enough about his class privilege and doesn’t recognize that some mothers legitimately prioritize career success or would go insane only talking to people whose age is measured in months, but I think it comes from a good place.

And yet all the attachment parenting blogosphere is like “h o n e s t l y if you’re not breastfeeding your child until three and you’re not using handmade cloth diapers and you don’t cosleep until the child decides to leave your bed on their own you’re basically abusing them l b q h.” There are people feeling guilty that cosleeping isn’t the right choice for them! This is absurd. How do people take such a kind and compassionate book and transform it into an opportunity to beat up on other mothers for doing it wrong?

The Other Baby Book: A Natural Approach To Baby’s First Year: Okay, now I understand where the guilt comes from.

This was pitched to me as “amazing hatereading material” and it was, in fact, amazing. I learned all about how you can prevent the adverse consequences of vaccines by giving your child megadoses of vitamin C and homeopathic preparations. And how formula is basically POISON. And pretty much every object I’ve ever bought is also POISON, full of dangerous and unpronounceable chemicals. And that “a person—a loving, calm, skilled, experienced person who was with the laboring woman, breathing with her, talking to her, being quiet with her, supporting her” is an acceptable substitute for fetal monitoring. And the important baby bonding of elimination communication (look, it’s fine if you personally feel that elimination communication helps you bond with your baby, but my opinion is that we live in the 21st century in which there is such a thing as a disposable diaper). And that epidurals hurt your baby (no, they don’t). And in general that we should trust Nature. To be honest, Nature invented the concept of parasitoids, I think she’s a terrible fucking mother.

Apparently “woman is the birth power source.” I have no idea what this means but to be honest I sort of want to make “the birth power source” my pregnancy tag.

Brain Rules for Baby: How To Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five: This book I like!

Prenatal stimulation is really cool and I feel sad about how much pseudoscience has given it a bad reputation. Your baby can learn things before they’re born! They can recognize Dr. Seuss books, or lullabies, or soap opera jingles, or their dad’s voice. And familiar sounds are likely to be comforting! It does not make your child a genius, but it doesn’t have to make your child a genius to be nifty.

Apparently one third to one half of new parents experience as much marital distress as couples who are currently in therapy trying to save their relationship. The biggest causes are sleep deprivation, social isolation, an uneven division of labor (usually in heterosexual couples favoring the man), and postpartum depression. To prevent this, practice empathy and ensure that you are doing your fair share of the chores (which will probably feel like you are doing an unfairly large share of the chores).

To increase children’s intelligence: breastfeed; talk to your baby a lot; encourage imaginative play, possibly using the Tools of the Mind classroom techniques which increase executive function; praise effort, not IQ. I think the last piece of advice was poorly phrased in the book: they imply that you should just switch out “you did well on that math test, you’re really smart” with “you did well on that math test, you worked really hard.” Of course, if your kid didn’t work hard at all, they’re going to be totally aware that you’re bullshitting them. So you should probably just say “good job” about the math test and instead praise their soccer performance, where they keep tripping over their own feet but also keep showing up to practice.

To increase children’s happiness: practice a demanding but responsive parenting style (support, warmth, and acceptance, combined with high standards and strictly enforced rules); be comfortable with your own emotions, including negative ones; be attuned to your children’s emotions; teach children to label their own emotions; validate and don’t judge emotions, but teach children about unacceptable behavioral responses to emotions and view crises as an opportunity to teach self-regulation skills; if your child is throwing a tantrum about not having a cookie, say something like “I bet you wish you could have another cookie. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and make all the carrots taste like cookies.” The advice here is pretty similar to How To Talk So Kids Will Listen (And Listen So Kids Will Talk).

To encourage self-control and altruism: create reasonable, clear rules; praise when the rules are followed and the absence of bad behavior; be warm and accepting when enforcing rules; when punishing, be swift and consistent, use real punishments, and remind your child that you love and accept them; whenever possible, use natural consequences or withdrawal of parental attention; provide an explanation for all rules during warnings, praise, and punishment; don’t spank.

I have two complaints about this book. First, autism is described as a single condition caused by a deficit in theory of mind, even though the evidence suggests that theory of mind deficits are not universal in autism. Second, the author explicitly claims that their advice might not apply to single parents, gay parents, or blended families because research has mostly been done on parents who are heterosexual married couples. I’m not sure why your parents being gay would mean that one should instead be harsh and unaccepting when enforcing rules, but okay.

Caring For Your Baby And Young Child: Birth To Age 5: Extremely complete, fairly mainstream, not a lot to say about it.

I must say I have a grudge against the American Academy of Pediatrics on the cosleeping thing. If you control properly for confounders, sleeping in a nursery is only a little less dangerous than safe cosleeping. And yet the AAP is all like “you should NEVER EVER EVER cosleep even if it is the ONLY WAY to get a good night’s sleep and even if you are afraid that YOU WILL KILL YOUR CHILD IN A CAR ACCIDENT DUE TO SLEEP DEPRIVATION OTHERWISE”, and their book is not only doesn’t address concerns about nurseries but also is like “here’s some advice about how to decorate your kid’s nursery.” Bleh. I can’t help but think that this is a class thing.

The guide to improving your child’s brain health includes the statement that you should avoid subjecting your child to psychological or physical traumas. Thanks, AAP. I never would have guessed.

Montessori From The Start: The Child At Home, From Birth To Age Three: What is it with parenting books and taking umbrage about totally random things? This book objects to disposable diapers and playpens. Like, honestly, lots of children use disposable diapers, and yet they all wind up toilet trained eventually anyway, so I don’t see any reason to stress about it. More seriously, Montessori from the Start also objects to pretend play, which is cognitively important for the development of small children.

I like the Montessori attitude of respecting children’s autonomy and giving them responsibility. I think that this book is exactly correct that toddlers are capable of handling a lot more than people think they are, if parents are patient and willing to teach. The book gives many practical suggestions of activities that allow one’s toddler a sense of independence and self-reliance, such as teaching the toddler to make their own snack.

The Expectant Father: The Ultimate Guide for Dads-To-Be: I was hoping for a book something along the lines of The Birth Partner, but for the entire pregnancy– a calm, patient book aimed not at the pregnant person but at the pregnant person’s support network. Unfortunately, that is not this book. This book is very definitely aimed at men. The sections about How You Might Be Feeling This Month include lots of information about what your masculinity is doing. Maybe you are feeling more masculine because you impregnated a woman! Maybe you are feeling less masculine because you’re experiencing couvade syndrome! Since my husband does not really have a masculinity in the first place, this book was less than helpful.

One thing that was actually good about this book was its extensive advice for deployed fathers feeling connected to the pregnancy. I myself am neither in the military or married to someone who is, but if you are this book might be helpful.

The Baby Owner’s Manual: An extremely cute premise– basically it’s a baby care book written as if it were an operating manual for a car or an electronics device. The advice is mostly boring standard advice you will also find in the American Academy of Pediatrics book. I had hoped it would be laugh-out-loud funny, but unfortunately the authors were insufficiently good at puns to make that happen. Not recommended.

Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd: A series of games which teach mathematical concepts to children from birth through school-age.  It covers symmetry, numbers, functions, and grids, and provides a variety of games that you can play with children and they can play with each other. While I know literally nothing about mathematical education, it does seem like the suggested activities are fun and would help build mathematical reasoning. Weirdly, it does not include any moebius strips.

Eating Well When You’re Expecting: A guide for nutrition for preconception, pregnant, and breastfeeding parents. This book appears to follow the USDA’s nutritional guidelines. Like all books in the What to Expect series, it is overly conservative about food safety (for instance, it forbids sushi because of the risk of parasite infection) without providing sufficient information to allow the reader to assess what they should eat based on their own risk tolerance. I suggest consulting Expecting Better or Debunking the Bump for food safety information.

Eating Well When You’re Expecting does not contain any information that you cannot find in What To Expect When You’re Expecting, except for a bit more information about various nutrients, some trouble-shooting about how you can get your nutrient needs met if you’re busy or broke or nauseous or at work, and a large number of pregnancy-safe recipes. I would suggest skipping it unless you’re having serious problems getting your vegetable/proteins/grains/whatever servings, in which case it might come in handy.

This is probably my fault for pirating the epub in the first place, but not having a search function is a huge pain in the ass if you’re trying to figure out which food groups peas count as. So if you are planning, like me, to maintain a spreadsheet where you keep track of your servings of Vitamin C foods, it might be worth obtaining an ebook with a search function.

Debunking the Bump: A Mathematician Mom Explodes Myths About Pregnancy: If you liked Expecting Better, you’d like this book, as they are in fact identical.

Debunking the Bump goes through a long list of things that pregnant people are supposed to worry about and tells you which ones are the biggest concerns, and which ones you probably shouldn’t worry about. She considers miscarriage and stillbirth to be an order of magnitude worse than congenital disability, which she considers to be an order of magnitude worse than things which cause minor impairments (very low birth weight), which she considers to be an order of magnitude worse than things which cause statistically detectable impairments (low birth weight). Given this value set (things will probably change if you have different values!), here is a listing of how risky things are in order of how risky they are.

1. Smoking more than ten cigarettes a day.
2. Delaying from age 35 to 36.
3. Smoking less than ten cigarettes a day.
4. Delaying from age 30 to age 31.
5. Delaying from age 25 to age 26.
6. Having a BMI of over 30.
7. Alcohol abuse.
8. Contracting viruses from small children.
9. Lead.
10. [Tied] Not eating oily fish; driving.

Of course, many of these are not actionable: you can’t become younger, and if you are smoking cigarettes while pregnant it is probably because you are a nicotine addict and not because you are unaware that it is very risky. Here is her list of actionable advice:

1. Wash your hands frequently when interacting with small children; avoid baby drool.
2. Cut down on discretionary car trips, wear your seatbelt, and drive cautiously.
3. Eat a daily serving of fish, particularly salmon and mackerel.
4. Eat organic vegetables to avoid organophosphate pesticide residue, particularly green beans and bell peppers.
5. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever eat any kind of meat without microwaving it or thoroughly cooking it first. This includes cold cuts!
6. At your next prenatal checkup, ask for your blood to be tested for lead. If your lead levels are high, take a calcium supplement.

The Shit No One Tells You: A Guide To Surviving Your Baby’s First Year: I really wanted to like this book! It’s a funny memoir by a disabled lesbian about the experience of parenting. I think a lot of parenting books are really, uh, optimistic, and The Shit No One Tells You provides a realistic point of view on how much labor sucks (a lot), whether you will have time to do anything except take care of a baby (no), and how much poop your life will involve (lots, and sometimes preceded by the word ‘projectile’).

But then I got to the chapter on vaccines.

Look, I feel like I’m a tolerant human being. “The research on this subject is overwhelming and confusing and I don’t know what the right thing to do is” is a common feeling. I am even sympathetic to parents who don’t want an autistic child, particularly an autistic child with high support needs. But when you say something like “there are so many anecdotes about children who got vaccines and then the light in their eyes just went out!”… guys, I’m autistic, and I’m a person. The light is still on in my eyes! I understand I am verbal, I don’t require a paid caregiver, and my violent meltdowns are extraordinarily rare, but people with more support needs than I have are still people! It is like finding a worm in the middle of an apple. The rest of the apple might taste really good, but it kind of ruined my whole experience.

Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers: This book contains medically inaccurate information about formula. In the developing world, breastfeeding is a very important public health intervention: breastfeeding reduces the risk of severe gastrointestinal infections, which can kill; parents who use formula in the developing world can wind up making their baby’s formula with unsafe water or diluting formula to save money. In the developed world, where most people can afford formula and the water is generally pretty safe, breastfeeding is less important: it leads to fewer gastrointestinal infections (which are far less dangerous in the developed world), lower rate of constipation, and probably a higher IQ. Many of the benefits this book claims simply have not been backed up by evidence.

In addition, Breastfeeding Made Simple has an anti-science attitude that upsets me. It’s true that formula was widely adopted, not because it was better, but because it seemed more scientific. And it’s true that some parents, inspired by behaviorism, ignored their babies’ cries and hunger signals. But that does not mean that we have learned that sometimes the wisdom of motherhood matters more than science; it means that science is self-correcting and sometimes makes mistakes, but that we can revise these mistakes. And it doesn’t mean that alternative medicine is an adequate substitute for real medicine.

I don’t mean to criticize this book overall. If you take the alleged benefits of breastfeeding with a grain of salt, it seems like an extraordinarily useful resource for breastfeeding parents, covering many common pitfalls. Babies do not understand the concept of clocks, and so you should generally expect to feed your children on their own schedule, not on yours; formula-fed babies take to a schedule much better, while for breastfed babies scheduling feedings can lead to underfeeding and loss of milk. You should never experience pain worse than a slight tenderness while breastfeeding: if you do, your baby probably has an improper latch-on. To ensure proper latch-on:

1. Hold your baby’s body under your breast and firmly against you; align your baby’s nose to your nipple; allow the baby’s head to tilt slightly back.
2. Lightly bring your baby to the breast (NOT breast to baby), rubbing your nipple along your baby’s face until the baby’s mouth opens.
3. Before the baby has developed head and neck control at four to six weeks, gently push the baby to get the baby to take more of your breast into their mouth.

For the first forty days after your baby is born, you should not expect to do anything except sleep and breastfeed. Clarify this state of affairs with your coparent(s); even though you may be home for parental leave and they are at work, they should still expect to handle all the cooking and cleaning. However, over time, breastfeeding becomes easier than formula feeding; you don’t have to prepare formula in the middle of the night, you can just sleepily stick the baby on your boob.

If your baby has enough stools, they are probably getting enough food. After the first week, the baby should have three to four stools the size of a quarter or more daily. It may help to track your breastfeedings and the baby’s stools on a piece of paper. Your doctor will weigh the baby; if the baby is losing weight, they are not getting enough food. If you are a neurotic wreck, or if you have some reason to believe you might not produce adequate milk, investing in a baby scale allows you to check your child’s weight at home. (This is unnecessary for most parents.)

The easiest way to wean a child is to simply continue to breastfeed until the child decides they no longer want to breastfeed. There are only positive consequences of this; in many hunter-gatherer cultures, children are breastfed until four or five. If that is not possible or desired, a gradual weaning is far superior to an all-at-once weaning; it is far less likely to be painful and to lead to health consequences like mastitis.

Several chapters at the end kindly and compassionately discuss breastfeeding difficulties. I appreciated the reminder that some breastfeeding is always better than no breastfeeding, and the most important aspect of feeding babies is that they get enough food. If you must supplement with formula for health reasons, this is not a failure.

Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students With Special Needs Succeed in School and Life: The opening paragraph of this book is about a teacher introducing the author to her students and saying “and these are my slow students”. The author wonders, “doesn’t she know that they can hear her?” As soon as I read that, I knew I would like this book.

It’s no secret that a lot of special education is really bad. “We’re cutting shop, which you like and are good at, so you can spend more time reading, which you hate and are bad at” bad. “This kid with ADHD forgot their homework, so we’re keeping them in from recess to make it up” bad. Neurodiversity in the Classroom argues that, instead, teachers of neurodivergent children should deliberately construct positive niches that build on the children’s skills and strengths. He provides a seven-step process for doing so:

1. Strength Awareness. Teachers and the student know what the student is good at and don’t just think of them as a pile of flaws and disabilities.
2. Positive Role Models. The student is aware of adult role models who have the same neurodivergences they do, including both celebrities and people in the community.
3. Assistive Technologies and Universal Design for Learning. Assistive tech is technology that improves access for disabled people, such as augmented and alternative communication devices, wheelchairs, and large-print and Braille reading materials. Universal design for learning is designing a learning environment that accommodates a wide array of learning differences for both neurotypical and neurodivergent children: for instance, using interactive digital books which provide speech, text, and graphics.
4. Enhanced Human Resources. The use of individuals besides the teacher to help the student, including psychologists, physical therapists, parents, tutors, and other students.
5. Strength-Based Learning Strategies. The teacher should build on the student’s abilities and interests when teaching them; for instance, an intellectually disabled student who loves music can be taught to read through song lyrics.
6. Affirmative Career Aspirations. The student should be aware of careers that they are well-suited to, given their neurodivergence and other abilities. For instance, a student with ADHD might be encouraged to look into jobs that involve novelty and movement, like being a personal trainer.
7. Environmental Modification. An environment should be created that fits the student’s needs. For instance, a teacher might muffle school bells if they have an autistic student with a sensitivity to sound.

The book is full of practical ideas about accommodating neurodivergent people in the classroom. For example, to accommodate a student with ADHD, the teacher might help the student use time-management software, frequently change activities (group work, then individual work, then lecture), provide hands-on learning activities, hold science or physical education classes outdoors, introduce movement breaks into the day, or have the student use a balance ball chair instead of a regular chair.

The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education At Home: A lot of the advice here seems like silly and/or counterproductive ways to educate children. Why would I waste energy teaching my children to be able to name off the English kings in order? Why would you attempt to teach spelling through workbooks instead of teaching it the way every good speller learned to spell– lots of exposure to text and having their misspellings corrected? Why would you primarily teach subjects through having children do readings and then outline their readings? (Why not spaced repetition? Oh, right, they didn’t have that in the Renaissance.) Why are you teaching children to think using formal logic, but not even addressing the skill of reading a study? Where, pray tell, is the evidence base?

Not all of the Well-Trained Mind is bad. Teaching the humanities as a single subject in its historical context seems to me to be a better approach than artificially separating art, music, literature, and history. A great books education still seems to me like a useful way to teach about the development of intellectual thought. But I expect the correct way to do it is just to work through the St. John’s College Great Books list once the kids get into high school, and not bother with all this nonsense about outlining.

Every Book Is A Social Studies Book: How To Meet Standards with Picture Books, K-6: This is pretty much exactly what it says in the title: a bunch of ways to use classic children’s books to teach about social studies topics. (“Let’s use the Sneetches and discuss prejudice!” “Let’s read about Ellis Island, then talk to people we know who are immigrants!”) If this sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, you’d probably be interested in it. It is mildly annoying that one of the suggested lessons is about reducing one’s garbage output, when in reality excessive garbage production is not a particularly urgent environmental issue and it would be much better if they had talked about climate change instead.

Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs: In case you’re wondering, these skills are focus and self-control, perspective-taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and self-directed engaged learning.

To build focus and self-control: support your child’s interests; play games that encourage executive function, like guessing games, puzzles, sorting games with changing rules, Simon Says, and Do The Opposite Of What Simon Says; have children participate in reading books by repeating refrains or familiar words; for children over the age of two, show them age-appropriate, meaningful, educational, and nonviolent television; no background television; encourage children to play pretend; get children to make plans, follow plans, and then discuss what they accomplished; ensure your child is well-rested and has breaks; model focus, self-control, and taking breaks yourself.

To build perspective-taking: model perspective-taking; teach children collective problem-solving skills, like brainstorming possible solutions and identifying ways to meet everyone involved’s goals; be warm and kind to your children; validate your children’s feelings; talk about feelings– yours and theirs; talk about other people’s points of view in everyday life; encourage playing pretend; when a child does something that hurts others, explain how it hurts others; ask children to try to figure out the goals and motivations of people they know and fictional characters.

To build communication: model a love of language and literature; talk a lot to infants and toddlers; talk about subjects that go beyond the here and now, like what happened in the past and might happen in the future; talk about what your children find interesting; tell stories about your life and ask children to tell stories about theirs; read to children and talk about books with them; play word games; encourage children to write; use cognitively engaging talk and complex words; give children access to many forms of media, including music, art, and the performing arts.

To build the ability to make connections: tell the child about other things that are connected to their passions (e.g. a knight is like a superhero in the past); acknowledge that making mistakes is part of learning; give children open-ended toys like balls and dolls; use spatial words like “above”, “behind”, “below”, etc.; when playing with children, don’t boss them around, but instead ask questions, describe, and point out mathematical concepts; play hide-and-seek and treasure hunts; use math talk in everyday situations, such as giving out cookies; give children chores that involve math; play board games and dominoes, which involve counting; show children optical illusions; give them feedback on the strategies they chose for thinking about problems.

To build critical thinking: encourage your child’s curiosity and interests; let them play; give them accurate and valid information, even if you have to look things up; help children find other experts; teach children how to assess if things are true; talk about television shows and ads to encourage media literacy; when you and your child have a conflict, help them brainstorm ways to resolve the conflict; talk to your children about confounding variables (or someone else will).

To build the ability to take on challenges: model managing your stress, talking to others about stress, and taking time for yourself; don’t protect your child from normal bad experiences; have a warm, caring, and trusting relationship with your child; don’t freak out about your child hurting themself; help them develop coping strategies for stress; have reasonable expectations; have your child come up with a plan for following your rules and meeting your expectations, including a plan for if their first plan doesn’t work; let shy children watch new situations and gradually come to participate; promote your child’s passions; praise effort not ability; teach them that the brain is like a muscle and it gets stronger with use and hard work.

To encourage self-directed and engaged learning: be trustworthy and reliable, providing safety, security, and structure; help children set and work for goals; always include a social, emotional, and intellectual aspect to learning; when a child is recalling a past event, practice a high-elaborative style, in which you ask open-ended questions, show interest, provide feedback to the child, and repeat what the child says; have conversations that explore the past, the future, and fantasy; have children explain what they’re learning; have children strive for their personal best; give children accountability through clear expectations, acknowledging their strengths, and praising effort; create a community of learners.

How To Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid For Success: You know that thing where people say DARE makes kids use drugs more because it normalizes drug use by telling them about all the other kids who are doing drugs? I don’t know about DARE but that is definitely true of this book for me. Normally, I think that unstructured play is the best thing for children, and my parents gave me plenty of time for it. I know there are a lot of great schools; I’ve met enough people who went to Ivies to be aware that their college experience honestly wasn’t that much different than my own. And I had a full-time mental illness as a teenager which meant that I didn’t do three hours of homework a night or go to fourteen extracurriculars.

But then I read this book and I was like “holy shit, people will judge your child for going to Barnard instead of Stanford? People hire coaches to help their children optimize their college applications? People start trying to get their children into prestigious preschools as soon as they’re born? THERE’S SUCH A THING AS A PRESTIGIOUS PRESCHOOL???????” and now I have tons of anxiety disorder fuel I didn’t before. Thanks! Very helpful.

Also, what is it with old people and the trophy thing? Yes, I got a participation trophy for soccer when I was six. No, I was not somehow deceived into thinking I was good at sports; I was perfectly fucking aware I sucked at sports. No, I don’t think it screwed me up. Can’t we wait for relentless competition until the kids are no longer reading books with pictures in them?

The Happiest Baby on the Block: When babies are born, they are not 100% finished yet. Human babies are far more dependent than nonhuman babies, because we have big heads and narrow hips and if we waited for the babies to actually be finished mothers would be way more likely to die in childbirth. Therefore, babies are likely to be very fussy and bad at self-soothing for the first few months of their life.

The solution is to create an environment that imitates the womb. This is what The Happiest Baby on the Block calls the 5 S’s:

• Swaddling– tightly wrap your baby. You can do this really tightly; most parents wrap far too loosely, for fear of causing damage.
• Side or Stomach– put the baby on their side or their stomach, not their back. (Always put the baby on their back when they sleep, to reduce risk of SIDS.)
• Shhhhhh– Make a loud shushing sound near the baby’s ear. Try to be as loud as the baby’s crying. You can also use a white noise CD.
• Swinging– Rock the baby, put them in a swing, or even stick them on the washing machine. For this one, it’s important to be gentle, because shaking a baby can cause brain damage.
• Sucking– Give the baby something to suck on, such as a pacifier, your finger, or your boob.

The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How To Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old: The part of toddlers’ brains that is good at language and logic is immature, and therefore the emotional and impulsive part of their brains is in the driver’s seat. It is best, therefore, to think of yourself not as your child’s boss or as your child’s friend, but as an ambassador from Adult Land to the exotic country of Toddlerlandia, with its strange customs and manners. An ambassador is unfailingly polite and respectful, and they’re willing to negotiate. But when a country is trying to get away with something that is absolutely unconscionable, an ambassador is willing to put her foot down and say “my country will not accept this.”

When a toddler is upset, always begin by echoing what she wants and feels, to make her feel understood, before taking a turn to tell her your important messages. (Of course, if your child is doing something that harms herself or others, always stop her first and then empathize. You don’t her to be hit by a car because you empathized while she was running into the street!) Use language toddlers understand: short phrases, repeated several times, with animated gestures and an expressive tone of voice.

If your child is behaving in an annoying but not dangerous way, first empathize with her, using words she understands. Then offer her a win-win compromise where you both get something you want. If she continues to behave in an annoying way, clap your hands hard and growl “no!” If she still does that, then kindly ignore her until she quiets, checking in every twenty to thirty seconds to empathize again. If your child is harming herself or others, or breaking one of your firm rules, use an appropriate consequence such as a time-out or taking away a privilege.

The best way to combat bad behavior is to prevent it. Therefore, give your child plenty of attention and praise when they’re doing well. Praise is often more likely to be believed if you say it to another person where the toddler can overhear. Offer your child age-appropriate choices (although not with more than two options, which is the most she can handle). Sometimes pretend to be incompetent at things (“do the pants go on your head?”) to make your child laugh and feel confident. Occasionally delay something your child wants for ten or twenty seconds, to give the child practice with patience and teach them that things they want will come if they wait. Help them practice breathing slowly, so they can do it when overwhelmed. Spend special time with them (as little as five minutes) several times a day, and talk to them at night about things they did well over the course of the day. If your child does not have a lovey or transitional object, help her find one. To teach appropriate behavior, tell stories about children who behave in appropriate ways, notice and praise other children who behave appropriately, and role-play troublesome situations when the child is calm.

[content warning: depressing fact about the Holocaust]

Free To Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life: It turns out this whole time Mike Blume and I have been unfairly blaming the Prussians and school was just as bad before then. The 17th century Protestants are going about memorizing little ditties about how if you tell a lie you will go to hell and be tortured for eternity. Not to be outdone, the Catholics were memorizing “What does it mean to resist authority? To resist authority is to rebel against the divine order. What happens to those who do not submit to authority? They will suffer eternal damnation.”

The basic thesis of this book is that children have a natural drive to learn, which schools successfully manage to beat out of them over the course of twelve years. This seems plausible to me. Preschoolers are, after all, known for their incessant questions. Human beings evolved to have an extended childhood because of how much we need to learn. It seems extraordinarily strange that evolution would have us pay all the costs of taking care of a child for ten or fifteen years instead of having new children, and not bother to evolve children a desire to actually learn things as opposed to being dragged into learning kicking and screaming. Other animals learn through play, and children do have a notoriously strong desire to play. We know that extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation dead. And hunter gatherer tribes do not explicitly teach their children; instead, their children play games, imitating the adults, and over time acquire all the skills they need to be successful hunter gatherers. The fact that children have to be forced to learn is very strange, and primarily because for a very long time obedience and respect for authority were far more important virtues to teach children than independence and autonomy. Since, nowadays, independence matters more, it makes sense to shift back to a forager model of learning.

My one point of disagreement is that Free to Learn adheres to a Sudbury school/unschooling model in which children basically do whatever they want. I agree that that is the ideal and it works best for hunter-gatherers. However, hunter gatherers also have thousands of years of social technology, which means that the games children want to play are games which teach them skills useful in a hunter-gatherer society. We have, clearly, wasted our last couple of thousand years of cultural evolution on getting children to memorize things about eternal torture. So in the meantime I think something like Montessori is correct.

That said, time for unstructured play is also very important. Consider Little League versus a game of baseball with your neighbors. Because you have a coach at Little League, you’re probably going to be better at baseball, if for some reason you care about elementary schoolers actually being good at baseball. But if you play with friends you get the same amount of exercise, you’re free from adults, and you get practice resolving conflicts fairly and compromising with others about what you want to do. Kids who really really don’t want to play baseball don’t have to, and there’s an incentive to make playing baseball more fun for kids who suck at it– otherwise, you won’t have enough players to make up the team. And Mom doesn’t have to drive anyone anywhere. It just seems like a better system all around.

Interesting fact: The Baining are apparently the world’s most boring people, and at least one anthropologist quit studying them in disgust at how dull they are. They think that natural things are shameful and that the purpose of human life is work. Almost uniquely among human cultures, they don’t really tell stories; most of their conversation focuses on work and details of daily living. Free to Learn argues this strange behavior is linked to the Baining finding children’s play shameful and discouraging or even punishing it.

Other interesting fact: At Auschwitz, Jewish children played gas chamber.

[content warning: child sexual abuse]

Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education For Grades K-1: You know how sex-positive feminists are always like “we need comprehensive sex education that goes beyond STIs and putting condoms on a banana. Sex education should talk about pleasure. It should give children an opportunity to think about sexual ethics and their sexual values, without assuming the only way to ethically have sex is to wait until marriage. It should be inclusive of disabled people and LGBT+ people. It should help people set boundaries and teach them to respect other people’s consent.” Well, good news, this exists and it’s called Our Whole Lives.

I particularly liked the abuse education lesson. Child sexual abuse education is very important, but I worry that if you only talk about genitals in the context of abuse, then it winds up treating genitals as bad and wrong and forbidden, which is not the message we want to send. The lesson on abuse begins by talking about healthy things we do for our bodies like exercising and eating vegetables, then talks about how loving touch is another healthy thing we do with our bodies which makes people feel good. Then masturbation is discussed briefly, along the lines of “masturbation is touching your own vulva or penis. Some children do this and other children don’t. Either way it is fine, but masturbation must be done in private.” Then they move to talking about how no one should ever touch you without your consent except in an emergency, and you don’t have to put up with touch that makes you feel angry or afraid. Only after all this context has been laid out do they talk about sexual abuse. I think this gives the message that (a) touch in general and sexuality in specific is a good thing, but (b) some bad people use touch in a way that is hurtful to others. Which I think is the right message to be sending.

Disability is included casually throughout the program: for instance, some of the children in stories are disabled, and the teacher is asked to specifically point out that disabled bodies are also wonderful.

On Mommyblogging

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting

[content note: brief mention of child abuse]

I see a lot of criticism of mommyblogging as being disrespectful of children’s privacy. (Here’s a pretty typical article.) I think I have a unique perspective on this, because I am one of the small handful of people who are currently adults who have firsthand personal experience with being written about as children.

My mother was the editor of our local parenting magazine. Every doctor’s and dentist’s office in the tricounty area had a copy. And every month, my mother wrote an editor’s note, which was almost always about me and my sister.

It was awesome.

We were famous! I have fond memories of getting my mom’s magazine each month and turning to the pages that were all about me. I remember bringing one of my mother’s columns in for show-and-tell and the other children were extremely impressed that my life was the subject of a whole story in a real magazine, like I was the Backstreet Boys or something.

And as an adult… my childhood is really well-documented compared to most people’s childhoods. It’s really cool that there is an essay about every month of my sister’s and my life, spanning nearly a decade. I’ve occasionally read them and been reminded of things that happened in my childhood that I don’t remember (“oh yeah! I used to lie on my stomach on the swingset and pretend I was flying! That was really fun.”)

It’s true that my opinion is probably somewhat biased by the fact that no one bullied me about it. On the other hand, people definitely knew that my mom wrote articles about me, and I was bullied a lot, but I was not bullied on that specific topic. Children, in general, don’t bother to read parenting magazines, so they never found out unless I told them. And everyone I told thought it was nifty! I actually think that is probably a really common response to “and also tens of thousands of strangers are reading articles about me”.

My mother did not use best practices for mommyblogging, in my opinion. For instance, I had no ability to veto columns, which I think is a good practice which I intend to adopt once I have children and want to write about them. But in spite of this, I don’t feel like it was a violation of my privacy. I think that was mostly because my mother made reasonable decisions about what she wrote about. She didn’t talk about my embarrassing medical problems, or my horrible grades, or her feelings of frustration and anger towards me (although those no doubt existed), or the time she caught me jerking off. She wrote about my involvement in theater, my interest in books, my happy relationship with my sister, and my vegetarianism. None of those are things a reasonable person would be ashamed of others knowing.

Of course, a lot of mommybloggers behave in a really unconscionable way. You shouldn’t compare your children to mass murderers or write about how you like one child better than others or fantasize about beating your children. If you do, you should definitely do it anonymously and never tell your children, except maybe in an appropriately contextualized way when they’re adults. (“This was a dark time in my life, and of course I love you and would never want to hurt you. I think this sort of impulse is very common among parents and doesn’t necessarily mean they actually want to beat their children.”) But I think that condemning mommyblogging in general is going too far.

Many writers have a natural desire to write about their experiences. When you’re the primary caregiver of children, a lot of your experiences are going to be about children. Being a hardliner about mommyblogging is essentially saying that writers of personal essays should take two decades off if they want to have kids. That is a pretty fucking significant cost, and even more so if they rely on writing as a source of income.

There are also costs for non-writing parents. It’s really natural, when you’re having a new experience, to want to read about other people going through the same experience. Personal essays from other people having a particular experience can be validating, reassuring you that your experience is normal and other people have gone through the same thing. They can help prepare you for the challenges that lie ahead. They can help you put your feelings into words or develop new frameworks for understanding your experiences. It would be sad if these essays existed for physical disability, neurodivergence, founding a startup, being unemployed, dating, having a wedding, writing a book, weightlifting, and running the Boston Marathon, and parenting was the one area of human life excluded. Parenting books talk about diapering, but personal essays talk about projectile poop. Parenting books talk about how people with mental illnesses can be fine parents, but personal essays talk about the guilt and shame when you explain the scars on your arm to your five-year-old. Parenting books promise you that you will have a happy and loving relationship with your teenager, but personal essays talk about the frustration of watching the child you love grow up to become a stranger.

Here are my suggestions for parents who are considering writing about their children:

• Don’t write anything about your kid that you wouldn’t write about your spouse. Embarrassing medical issues? Nope. Feelings of rage and contempt? Nope. Comparisons to serial killers? Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you, no.
• If the child is old enough to have an opinion, ask for their permission before you publish anything about them. If they can read, let them read articles about themselves before you post them.
• In a lot of nonfiction essays, the anecdotes do not have to, technically speaking, be “true”. Even if you are talking about your feelings when your own child’s projectile poop ruined your nicest dress shirt, you can totally talk about this other parent you know and his dress-shirt incident. Maybe change the dress shirt to nice pants! Maybe he was using cloth diapers when you use disposables! The minor irrelevant details you can change are endless! (This is also an excellent way to steal other people’s anecdotes without them feeling like you’ve invaded their privacy. If you change enough things they might not even realize it’s about them.)

Why Is All Pregnancy Advice So Bad?

Tags

diets cw, parenting, pregnancy cw

[Content warning: brief discussion of weight gain; lots of discussion of food in pregnancy.]

There are a lot of books and websites in the genre “Mom Without Medical Background But With Quant Background Does Lit Reviews About Pregnancy.”

If you take the this seriously, a lot of pregnancy advice is useless or actively counterproductive. For instance, pregnant people are regularly advised not to change kitty litter. But– they argue– in reality, toxoplasmosis infections are almost always due to undercooked meat and unprotected contact with soil. Transmission due to cat litter is extraordinarily rare. An infected cat can only transmit toxoplasmosis for two weeks, and it’s unlikely those two weeks would happen while you’re pregnant. And if you change the kitty litter on anything approaching a regular schedule you’ll change it well before you can catch toxoplasmosis by touching poop. (Debunking the Bump, chapter one; Expecting Better, chapter nine.)

Or take weight gain. Pregnant people often worry about gaining too much weight. But gaining a little bit too much weight during pregnancy isn’t correlated with any particularly interesting outcomes, while gaining a little bit too little weight leads to low birth weight, which leads to every negative consequence imaginable. It’s much, much, much better to err on the side of gaining too much weight than too little. (Debunking the Bump, chapter four; Expecting Better, chapter ten.)

Fish consumption is the single most embarrassing example. Many pregnant people limit their fish consumption for fear of mercury poisoning, which lowers IQ. But eating fish in pregnancy is correlated with an increased IQ in children if you eat up to eight servings a week– well above the FDA’s recommended level of fish consumption. This is probably because fish is rich in omega-3 fatty acids. (Debunking the Bump, chapter two; Expecting Better, chapter six.)

And it goes on and on like this! For pages and pages! Which leaves me, a prospective parent, with the question: why is all pregnancy advice so bad?

I have thought of three possible explanations.

First, maybe random mothers with quant backgrounds are an unreliable source of information about pregnancy health. Perhaps I should pay attention to the government, my doctor, and What To Expect When You’re Expecting, instead of women with no medical background and access to Sci-Hub and Google Scholar. But when I’ve spot-checked the books they’ve generally been pretty accurate. And they mostly seem to agree with each other about what the data says, even though as far as I know they aren’t talking to each other. Most of the time, when people are making up random bullshit, they tend to make up different random bullshit (see also: nutrition advice). Also, I don’t like this explanation because Emily Oster says I’m allowed to eat sushi and What To Expect says I’m not and I don’t want to go through my nine mouths of pescetarianism sushiless.

Second, maybe all medical advice is like this. The general quality of information about medicine in general is exactly the same as the general quality of information about pregnancy, it’s just that I’ve bothered to actually look into pregnancy. This is very worrisome. What if this whole time I’ve been exercising because I thought it would make me live longer and actually I’m shortening my lifespan? What if I have been trying to cut down on neon-colored high-fructose-corn-syrup snacks for absolutely no reason? What if the true secret to fixing depression was doing handstands every day to encourage blood flow to the brain, and all the “fix your depression with yoga” people have been right all along?

Of course, the very most important pregnancy advice is generally accurate: it is really really bad to smoke or to drink to excess, and it’s much better to have a pregnancy before 35 than after 35. And a lot of the research is relatively new. We only started figuring out how pregnant people got toxoplasma gondii in 2000, and before then it was “like idk cats probably?” The FDA found that fish consumption was correlated with higher IQ in 2009. Folic acid was really really important before mandatory food fortification began in 1998, and it took a while to realize that very few people are folic acid deficient anymore. Perhaps it takes a while for this information to filter down to the general public, and in thirty years pregnant people will devour two plates of salmon and then go change the cat litter. So maybe the take home here is that medical consensus is correct about really really important things, but tends to be slow to adopt new information. (Which might be a good thing! There is, after all, a replication crisis.)

Third, maybe pregnancy advice is unusually bad for some reason. For instance, people do seem to be unusually risk-averse about pregnant people compared to other groups. So maybe people come up with recommendations (“don’t eat fish! don’t change cat litter!”) based on relatively weak evidence, because what if a bunch of women get mercury poisoning and then we have a huge epidemic of mercury babies? And when it turns out that cat litter or fish is actually fine, people tend to keep giving advice: what if the study was wrong? They want to err on the side of caution.

I think that risk aversion plays a nonzero role: for instance, I expect that’s behind folic acid supplementation (best to be on the safe side about whether the pregnant person is eating enough Cheerios) and telling women to avoid sushi (parasite infections from sushi are very rare but they do happen). And it probably even explains some of the weird downplaying of risk: if pregnant people are told to avoid both unpasteurized cheese and deli meat, without a clear explanation that deli meat is far far more dangerous than unpasteurized cheese, they might forget that they’re not supposed to be eating deli meat. But I’m not sure that risk aversion fully explains the fish thing or the weight gain thing.

On Youth Rights

Tags

ageism, ozy blog post, parenting

A lot of youth rights supporters think we should move power from adults to children. I am very sympathetic to this goal.

In some cases, it’s possible to give power directly to children. For instance, making it significantly easier for a minor to become an emancipated minor, allowing minors to change guardians, giving teenagers the right to vote (particularly in school board elections), and improving medical confidentiality laws for minors are all policies that give more power to children.

However, these policies mostly apply to preteens and teenagers. Three-year-olds would probably not be able to meaningfully exercise the ability to vote, nor are they particularly good at making their own medical decisions, nor are they able to support themselves as emancipated minors.

I agree with a lot of youth rights advocates that three-year-olds should have more ability to, say, decide for themselves what they want to have for dinner. But three-year-olds are really freaking incompetent. Sixteen-year-olds can generally be trusted to make medical decisions as reasonable as the average adult’s. Three-year-olds cannot. Given the general incompetence of three-year-olds, someone has to be in charge of deciding what things three-year-olds get to make choices about and what things they don’t, which means that someone has to have a considerable amount of coercive power over three-year-olds.

Basically, there are three groups of people that can make decisions about three-year-olds: the government, parents, and broad societal consensus. The government could decide that it is a law that everyone has to get their vaccines, and if you don’t then you don’t get to take advantage of certain government services (public school), you get your children taken away, or you go to prison. Parents could individually consider the costs and benefits of vaccines and decide whether it is the right decision for their child to vaccinate. Or broad societal consensus could shame, criticize, and pressure parents who don’t vaccinate their children, and possibly encourage e.g. babysitters and relatives to secretly get the children vaccinated without telling the parents.

(This is a little bit oversimplified, because in practice a lot of decisions get influenced by all three groups, but I hope you see what I’m getting at.)

A lot of statements that we need to “expand children’s rights” cache out as “we should move this decision about parenting from being decided by one group of people to being decided by a different group of people.”

For instance, free-range parenting is often written about as “children have a right to play outside”, but it actually caches out as “parents should individually make the decision of whether or not their children should play outside, and the government and broad societal consensus should not have opinions.” In my experience, free-range parents rarely seem to suggest that parents who don’t allow their children to wander should be shamed.

Similarly, I have seen discussion of the appropriate response of a parent whose daughter is friends with the daughter of a deeply religious Christian who forbids her to wear makeup: should the parent allow the girl to wear makeup at the parent’s house? This is framed as the child’s right to choose to wear makeup, but it actually caches out as saying that social consensus should be allowed to override parents’ wishes. I expect most liberal parents would be a lot more reluctant to allow the daughter of deeply feminist parents to wear makeup than to allow the daughter of deeply Christian parents to wear makeup, and that the issue wouldn’t come up for a teenage boy forbidden to wear makeup (as most teenage boys are, at least implicitly).

To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that any of the three groups that makes decisions about children’s welfare is somehow “bad”. I think each of them is suited to making certain decisions. I think the government should protect children from physical abuse, and do not think it is appropriate for the government to set bedtimes. I believe in parental discretion about breastfeeding, but not about Vitamin K injections.

The big difference between parent-made decisions and societal-consensus-made or government-made decisions is that parent-made decisions are more diverse. One parent can breastfeed while another does not, but societal consensus either has to approve or disapprove of breastfeeding, and has only a limited ability to take under consideration parents’ individual circumstances. On the bright side, that means that parent-made decisions may be better at taking into account the uniqueness of each individual parent and child: for instance, a parent’s decision about whether to continue breastfeeding can incorporate how much they value breastfeeding, how bothersome it is for them to pump at work, whether their child is prone to diarrhea, the level of support the breastfeeding parent experiences, how important breastfeeding is to their parent/child relationship, etc. And parent-made decisions have a lot of potential to be better than average. If you support children’s rights, you should be glad that parents get a lot of discretion to make decisions: the whole reason that any children get to set their own bedtimes, eat dessert first, and play outside without supervision is that parents are allowed to go against what other people think is good parenting.

On the negative side, all that diversity can lead to bad outcomes as well. The freedom of parents to go against societal consensus also allows them to teach their children that God created the universe in seven days six thousand years ago, to punish children who masturbate, and to forbid their children from having friends.

With regards to what side one should err on about which group should make a particular decision, I have several things to consider:

1. How confident are you that the current consensus is correct? To the extent that you think the current parenting consensus on a particular decision is misguided (for instance, if you think time-outs are harmful), you should support parent-made decisions, in the hopes that if parents try a bunch of different strategies eventually we will be able to discover better strategies. To the extent that you think the current parenting consensus is correct (for instance, if you think time-outs are the best possible discipline strategy), you should enforce it.
2. How confident are you that you know the right sort of parenting to do? If you are very certain that you have the right answer about how to make a particular decision, then you should encourage government or societal consensus to enforce it, whereas if you’re more uncertain it’s probably best to leave it up to the individual parent.
3. Do you think there is one right answer? To the extent that you think that there is one right decision for everyone (for instance, all babies should get their shots), you should prefer societal or governmental decision-making. To the extent that you think that there are multiple right decisions that depend on particular circumstances (for instance, you think that breastfeeding versus formula feeding depends on what the parent finds most convenient and rewarding), you should prefer parental decision-making
4. How important do you think this decision is? If you think this decision has a relatively small effect on outcomes of interest (e.g. children’s health, children’s happiness, adult income), then it’s probably not worth punishing people in order to get them to make the decision you want.

Book Post for September

Tags

my fucking state, ozy blog post, parenting, rationality, sex work

Stumbling on Happiness: Daniel Gilbert’s writing style is super-fun; I recommend reading Stumbling on Happiness if you like Slate Star Codex’s characteristic snark, because there’s a lot of it here.

Neurotypical people are very strange. I spent a large portion of this book going “wait, when most people experience something really really bad, they come up with reasons why it wasn’t so bad after all? They don’t think of a bunch of reasons about why it was actually worse than they thought and means they are doomed to eternal misery? Are you sure?” This just sounds incredibly fake. #DepressiveRealism

I am not sure how accurate this book is. I noticed several citations of things (priming!) that turned out to fail to replicate, but I don’t actually know off the top of my head everything that failed to replicate. Someone should write me a program that automatically highlights citations of papers that failed to replicate so I don’t believe them.

Deep Work: I have rarely read a book that was as useful for solving my particular problems that didn’t have “for borderline personality disorder” on the cover. Even then, half the stuff in the borderline personality disorder books are for people who have violent rages or substance abuse issues, which is not a problem Deep Work particularly has. So this is likely to be a fairly useless review for people who aren’t Ozy.

Deep Work is about cultivating deep work: distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to its limit. As a heuristic for separating deep work from shallow work, Deep Work suggests thinking about how long it would take to train a bright undergraduate to do the task. For instance, writing a good book is deep work because it takes years of expertise to become a good author, while scheduling a coffee date or creating a PowerPoint with the latest sales figures is shallow work. While not everyone needs to do deep work– entry-level positions are full of shallow work, and high-level executives hire other people to do deep work and are selected for their ability to make good snap decisions– Deep Work argues that our current economy has a high demand for deep work and a low supply. The current economy favors people who are superstars in their field and those who are really good at using computers, both deep-work-heavy skills; however, because of the rise of the Internet, we’re more distracted and prone to hyper-connectivity at the expense of deep thought and focus.

Deep Work emphasizes a sense of craftsmanship. Through cultivating a sense of craftmanship, you get into flow state, which is linked to overall happiness and pleasure. And through creating work that you can feel proud of– instead of frittering your life away going to meetings and answering emails– you can find a sense of meaning in your work, which allows you to be more satisfied.

Newport’s single biggest piece of advice, which he returns to hit on again and again, is that excessive use of the Internet kills deep work. If you don’t ever let yourself get bored, you’re not going to let your mind wander and have interesting new ideas for what you’re working on. (I personally have all my best ideas in the shower, probably because that’s the only place I can’t bring my laptop.) And if you’re constantly distracted and multitasking, you’re not developing the powers of focused concentration which are necessary for work. Work-related Internet use, like email, is actually even more evil than recreational Internet use, because it gives you the feeling you’re doing something productive. Newport’s advice is as follows: Don’t schedule time away from the Internet; schedule time where you are allowed to use the Internet. (I actually disagree with him about the evils of All Internet Browsing; fact-checking a blog post or researching Kuznets curves on Google Scholar are obviously different from Twitter, and I’ve found it’s nigh-impossible to do deep work without an Internet connection.) Quit social media for thirty days and only add back in services that caused a concrete improvement in your life. Pick up a hobby or form of entertainment other than reading Buzzfeed articles about the 33 Dogs That Look Most Like Presidents.

Other advice: Create a ritual to begin your deep work and transition your mind into a flow state; this might include stretching, setting up your workspace, or making a cup of tea. Write down what you’re doing for every half-hour of the day, and when you notice you’ve gotten off track revise the schedule. Alternate time spent alone and concentrating with time spent in serendipitous encounters (he gives the example of Bell Labs, in which people in a bunch of different disciplines encountered each other in the hallways and at lunch and talked about their work), which can prompt creative insight. Keep track of your daily hours spent in deep work; aim for about four. At the end of the workday (he recommends five-thirty), check your email a final time, prepare your to-do list for tomorrow, and then shut it down and don’t think about work until tomorrow morning; this gives you the idleness to recharge your energy and have insights, and since at the end of the day you’re tired enough to only do shallow work, the work you were doing probably isn’t that important anyway.

The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource For Your Child’s First Four Years: Amazon.com has discovered my weakness and is now solely recommending me parenting books with ‘science’ in the title.

This book makes an argument which I think is very reasonable about the alcohol/pregnancy connection: it seems plausible that alcohol has a dose-dependent effect on fetuses, so that light drinking has similarly light effects, which are outweighed by women who drink lightly in pregnancy typically being more educated and wealthier. (Of course, since the effect is quite small, there is no reason to freak out about drinks you had before you knew you were pregnant, nor even much reason to cancel that trip to Napa Valley you were looking forward to, as long as you only sip the wine and alternate it with lots of food.)

Studies about the safety of homebirth in other countries don’t necessarily generalize to the US because other countries have a lot more medical licensing. In the US, a person calling themself a midwife is not guaranteed to have any medical training whatsoever.

About 5% of women can’t breastfeed, and 10% can’t produce sufficient milk to feed their babies. If you are in this group, it is not because you are a bad mother, and there is nothing wrong with feeding your children formula, which is perfectly safe; the benefits of breastfeeding are fairly small and the costs of babies not being sufficiently fed are very high.

Effective ways to soothe a baby: white noise; skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding; giving the baby something to suck; swaddling the baby; rocking the baby.

Shaken baby syndrome is most often caused by parents who aren’t bad or abusive but who are overwhelmed and sleep deprived because their baby won’t stop crying and who do what humans naturally do with something that won’t work– they shake it. It can help to know that colic is normal and common and will pass, and to notice when you’re getting overwhelmed and take a break before you do something you’ll regret.

Children do not understand that guns are not toys. Studies repeatedly suggest that children– even children that receive gun safety instruction– will pick up and play with handguns. If you have guns, store them locked and unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate place, until your child is a teenager.

Exposure to print and books is tightly correlated with reading ability as an older child and teenager (a result that is, of course, completely unconfounded); eating books is therefore an important pre-literacy skill that parents should encourage.

Science of Mom: Unlike The Informed Parent, which takes a somewhat encyclopedic approach, Science of Mom explores a few issues in more depth. I particularly appreciate the first chapter, which is a good and accurate explanation of which pieces of parenting advice are worth listening to (whenever Cochrane says something other than ‘more research is needed’) and which pieces are not (anything that primarily focuses on rats, which is mostly useful in the event that you happen to be parenting a rat).

Another thing I really liked about Science of Mom is its focus on tradeoffs. The decision that’s right for some people isn’t right for others. The breastfeeding chapter can be basically summed up as “breastfeeding has health benefits, but many people can’t breastfeed and that’s totally fine and they should not feel guilty about it, and the benefits of breastfeeding are not large enough to be worth making you feel miserable.” And the bedsharing chapter explains how conflicted the research is on bedsharing and SIDS/suffocation, then encourages the reader to make their own decision based on their own values and assessment of the evidence.

Anti-anti-vaxxing is too mainstream, so fortunately Science of Mom has enlightened me about the possibilities of getting pissed off at parents who don’t get the Vitamin K shot. It is not dangerous! It is literally a vitamin that all babies are deficient in! Do you want your baby to have brain bleeding? I don’t think so! Those are two words that do not belong together! (And, yeah, babies are deficient in Vitamin K. Humans are very poorly designed.)

Delayed cord clamping is surprisingly important: because breastmilk is not very rich in iron, babies often experience iron deficiency, and a few minutes of iron-rich blood from the placenta can prevent iron deficiency and anemia. (For the biodeterminists in the crowd: adequate iron as a baby reduces the risk of lead poisoning.) Iron is also important in feeding your child solids; omnivores should consider starting their child on meat, while vegetarians/vegans should begin with iron- and zinc-fortified infant cereal.

The Birth Partner: The Birth Partner is primarily aimed at birth partners (i.e. non-medical people who support the pregnant person during labor). However, it is still useful for the pregnant person to read, as the book clearly explains the process of labor and provides guidance for figuring out what you want out of labor.

The Birth Partner is a wonderfully nonjudgmental book about giving birth. It lays out the evidence for and against medical interventions, as well as the available alternatives, then encourages the mother and birth partner to consider their values about birth and come to the decision that is right for them. It’s a rare book that is equally nonjudgmental about homebirth and elective C-sections (while acknowledging the dangers of both). Another thing I liked is that it didn’t assume that birth partners are the pregnant person’s life partner or the biological father of the baby; when it had advice for one of those groups it always says “if you are the X.”

I particularly appreciated the clear explanation of various non-painkiller pain relief techniques; a lot of books tend to just have “breathing” and “meditating” as your only options, while The Birth Partner gives a lot of different strategies for reducing your pain. (I particularly appreciated the woman who chanted “epidural epidural epidural” and, when asked if she wanted one, said “if I get to chant it I don’t need it!”)

Apparently it is recommended that if you’re doing natural childbirth you use a safeword. They called it a “code word” but it’s definitely a safeword. I am so amused. My safewords are, as always, “red”, “safeword” and “I forgot the safeword.”

Gender Dysphoria Rating: 0/10. This book is sufficiently inclusive that its use of “the mother” as the term for the pregnant person actually stuck out to me, instead of being something I glance over as normal boring societal cissexism. But it’s not exactly fair to take points away from a book because it’s great on every issue except this one.

The Danish Way of Parenting: This is a weird book for me to read because my friend Ilzolende fucking hated living in Denmark, and so whenever it is like “the Danish way of parenting is so great!” I am like “if Denmark is so great how come ILZO didn’t like it???” which I admit is not the best objection.

I have been spoiled by Science of Mom and The Informed Parent and am now sulky about parenting books that don’t include proper citations. This book’s evidence was mostly “Danish people are very happy, and therefore they must be happy because of the parenting techniques they use, so if you use the parenting techniques then your children will be happy! What’s a confounding variable?” Also they don’t cite any studies that show that people in Denmark actually parent the way they are claimed to parent in this book. I mean, I don’t know anything about how Danish people parent, they very well might, but how do I know that this person wasn’t just in Danish Berkeley?

In Denmark are there books that advise everyone how to parent like an American, or is Raise Your Children As If You Are In A Foreign Country just an American book genre?

I mean, the parenting advice is probably fine. I am totally in support of being authentic with your children and playing with them and family togetherness and positive discipline and the rest. But I do not think this book has good evidence for it.

Age of Em: I had been vaguely under the impression that Emworld was bad because subsistence living, but since making ems have a really nice world is significantly cheaper than running an em in the first place, we’d actually expect ems to have very enjoyable leisure and lots of music and stuff. And anyway most ems would probably be emulations of workaholics who actually want to work twelve hours a day. So it’s a very noncentral example of a subsistence world, and in general sounds like a very nice place that I hope my descendants would manage to experience if they have more conscientiousness than I do.

The Essential Guide to Freelance Writing: Nope, the concept of pitching people still gives me a panic attack. In retrospect, it is probably not this book’s fault that it failed to fix this.

The Gated City: This book informs me that a large number of economic and environmental problems could be solved by the policies which lead me, Ozy, to have lower rent. Since I don’t like having to pay a lot of money in rent, I have obvious reasons to support this thesis. So it seemed pretty convincing to me, but take with many relevant grains of salt. (Unless you happen to live in the SF Bay Area, in which case you should agree with this book 100% and also contact your local Insert County Here Forward for a voter guide.)

[cw: sex trafficking, slavery]

The Slave Next Door: I am impressed by the existence of a book about modern slavery that spends more time talking about agriculture and domestics than it does sex work, and sad that I feel impressed.

One thing I hadn’t realized before I read this book was how fuzzy the definition of ‘slave’ is for people in the modern US. There’s a remarkably thin line between “victim of sex trafficking” and “sex worker in an abusive relationship who gives her boyfriend some of the money she earns working.” There’s a remarkably thin line between “victim of labor trafficking” and “domestic who is being mistreated by her employer but can’t leave because her visa is linked to her employer.”

The impression that I’m getting from The Slave Next Door is that immigration reform would do a lot to reduce slavery in the US. A lot of slaves are either undocumented or have their documents stolen by their employers. Decriminalizing sex work also seems to me to be important for reducing sex trafficking; sex trafficking occasionally involves U.S. citizens who speak the language, while labor trafficking is almost solely immigrants.

Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: The title of this book is ‘Beyond Victims and Villains’, but there is clearly a villain in it! The villain is the child welfare system! False advertising!

Anyway, this is a really amazing book about minors doing sex work. Most of the time, the author argues, it’s not that minors are forced into sex work by pimps: it’s instead that– due to poverty, abuse, neglect, or homelessness– for many minors, sex work is the best way to support themselves. To many minors, street sex work seems like a better option than an often broken child welfare system. If we want to end underage sex work, the solution isn’t criminal: it’s changing the push factors that drive minors into sex work. This book does a really good job of emphasizing the agency of underage sex workers (something that is far too often ignored) while also recognizing how limited their choices are.

Disposable People: Before I read this book, I hadn’t realized how much innumeracy affects someone’s life– even more so than illiteracy. Many of the slaves in this book were kept in debt bondage (that is, they were laboring to pay off a debt to their owners). Their owners often told lies about how much the slaves owed, but the slaves, being innumerate, had no ability to check their owners’ numbers. They just thought “well, I did ask for a loan for my son’s wedding, and there was that one time my daughter got sick, and we had to pay for food that one time the crops failed… I know we’ve harvested a lot of crops for the owner, but I guess it makes sense that we’re still in debt,” because they have no way of comparing the very large number that medicine costs with the very large number that they earned from harvesting crops. If all the slaves knew they were being lied to, the institution would end: you can kidnap and beat up one person who tries to escape, but you can’t kidnap and beat up five hundred people. And also a lot of people stay because they feel honor-bound to pay off their debt, which they wouldn’t do if they knew they already had. Being able to do basic math is really important!

I hadn’t realized quite how much sex work happens in Thailand. The book points out that sex workers aimed at white people, being high-end, are usually not sex slaves; instead, sex slaves usually service middle- and working-class Thai men. While Disposable People does bash the police a little bit (they collect bribes and have no interest in actually preventing sex slavery), I think the book could have used a little more bashing of the sex-slave rescue industry, which is also pretty awful.

Mauritania really sucks as a country. I had known about the force-feeding of girls, but I hadn’t known that it is one of the few countries which still has endemic old-style hereditary slavery (as opposed to debt bondage, etc.). Of course, the Mauritanian government likes it that way, having declared all Mauritanian slaves to be ‘former slaves’ and then magically claimed to have fixed its slavery problem, because now all the people who are working for no pay but rice and a bed are doing it of their own free will! (It gets away with this because the government is totalitarian and censorship-happy.) Mauritania is also very poor, and many people go hungry, which helps preserve the slavery institution– if slaves ran away, they would starve.