Shared Environment Effects are Real

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thoughts on Parenting An Infant

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Universal Design for Parenting

Tags

disability, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, parenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread: Effective Altruism and Children

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post, parenting

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

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

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

Things I have thought of so far include:

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

Does anyone else have suggestions?

Book Post for November, Parenting and Fiction Books

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatives to comparing children:

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

Instead of worrying about treating children equally:

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

When one child bullies another:

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

When children are fighting:

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Post for October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The steps for parenting well while depressed were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(That is the entire scene.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distinctions Between Natalism Positions

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ozy blog post, parenting, utilitarianism it works bitches

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

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

So here are my proposed replacements:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Post for September

Tags

diets cw, disney descendants, god bothering, neoreactionaries cw, neurodivergence, parenting, pregnancy cw

When I was depressed, I read a lot of books and didn’t write reviews of them and now there is Too Much Backlog and I won’t ever get around to it. So you guys are just going to have to imagine what I thought of Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-Of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. (Not a big fan.)

Damaged Goods: New Perspectives On Christian Purity: I am a terrible audience for this book because I am very interested in both purity culture and sex-positive feminism and thus nothing she has to say is new to me. “Saving your first kiss until your wedding day is bad! Instead, you should try to figure out when you’re emotionally ready for kissing. It is bad when social pressure makes people ashamed of their decisions to kiss people or not to kiss people.” I mean, I agree and I suspect it will make a lot of people’s lives better if they believed this book, but I don’t feel like I got any new or interesting insight.

Mal’s Spell Book 2: This is the first piece of Descendants expanded universe material that I enjoyed as much as I enjoyed the original movie. (If this sentence doesn’t thrill and excite you, skip to the next review.) The premise is that the villain kids use Mal’s spellbook to write notes to each other, presumably in class. I was particularly charmed by Jay and Evie’s attempts to give Carlos romantic advice (at one point Jay is like “ASK. HER. OUT” which to be honest is also what I feel when I am giving romantic advice). I also enjoyed the excerpts from Auradon etiquette books which Mal pasted into the book and commented on (“apparently you are supposed to eat bananas with a fork? is that a thing?” “how would I know, I only just found out what comes in the peels”). Unfortunately, the second half of the book takes place during the plot of the movie, which both is kind of boring and makes the conceit of the book somewhat implausible. (Why are they passing notes in Mal’s apartment? Surely they can just talk.)

Fuck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Lasting Relationships: I actually gave up on this book half of the way through. I bought it because it had a truly amazing title. I had vaguely hoped the content would be about debunking the myth of the soulmate and encouraging people to marry people they’re compatible with even if that person isn’t their One True Love. Sadly, this is not the case. The actual content doesn’t seem to be bad, it is just targeted at a very different group of people than me. All of the first four chapters are different ways of saying “don’t meet someone hot and charming and let that blind you to the fact that they’re kind of a terrible person.” I, who have never dated a charming person in my life unless you could “charmingly awkward,” feel I am not the target audience for this advice. Also, at one point it advised that men cut their hair which I feel is a crime against male beauty.

Note that it does include a brief passage bashing people with borderline personality disorder. And the author’s a shrink? This is why it’s so hard to find a good therapist.

Postpartum depression and anxiety: a self-help guide for mothers: Did you know that postpartum depression is very common and not your fault or a sign that you’re a bad mother? Did you know that mild cases of depression can be treated with self-care, exercise, eating good food, getting enough sleep, and talking to your support system, but in severe cases you may need therapy and medication? Did you know that to help depressed people it is best to be supportive and nonjudgmental and to encourage them to develop a routine and to take care of themselves physically and mentally? If any of these facts sound novel to you, maybe you should pick up this book. Otherwise, skip it.

This Isn’t What I Expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression: This book might be useful to read if you expect to have postpartum depression, even if you’ve been depressed before. It addresses a lot of postpartum-depression-specific concerns, such as coping with common postpartum stressors, dealing with your grief that parenthood isn’t what you expected and resolving your concerns about turning into your mother. There are a variety of helpful CBTish worksheets. I expect to be referring to this often when I have postpartum depression. While it says it is intended for postpartum depression, in reality it covers a variety of postpartum conditions, such as postpartum OCD, postpartum anxiety, postpartum trauma, and postpartum stress syndrome. Sadly, postpartum psychosis is mostly addressed in terms of “you probably don’t have it” and “if you do you should go to the hospital.”

Honestly, this book made me feel like I have so much of a handle on postpartum depression. They devoted pages and pages to no-fucking-shit stuff like “you cannot take care of a baby while depressed on your own” and “it is important to be able to talk to people about your depression” and “you need to have lower standards for yourself while depressed.” But when I think about it if it’s someone’s first time being depressed then they might not know this stuff! I am clearly an expert depressed person and going to do great.

Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives: A combination memoir and pop science book, the author discusses her pregnancy while reviewing fetal origins research. As always, much of this research probably won’t replicate and should be taken with a grain of salt; the author has a little bit of a tendency to write about salacious rat research without providing the caveat that rats are not human beings and many such studies fail to generalize. Nevertheless, much of the advice– about weight gain, stress, alcohol consumption, exercise, and so on and so forth– seems reasonable and solid, and she more-or-less manages to write about the actually important things without going into “well no one can PROVE hair dye doesn’t hurt your baby!” nonsense.

[The next two reviews discuss dieting.]

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works: I actually have a very healthy relationship with food (I got almost a perfect score on their intuitive eater quiz, and the one thing I got dinged on was something they explicitly said later in the book is okay.) So I enjoyed this book a lot because it was full of neuroses I don’t have. For once I get to feel like the sane person who doesn’t crave chocolate cake, eat sixteen different things because chocolate cake is Forbidden and Not Allowed, continue to want chocolate cake, and then finally end up eating it anyway.

I have practiced intuitive eating for most of my adult life, although it is only in the past few years I knew to call it “intuitive eating” rather than “common sense.” My weight is consistently in the normal range, and over the course of my pregnancy I’ve gained the recommended number of pounds without tracking calories. (Only a third of pregnant people gain within the recommended weight range.) On the other hand, I might simply be the sort of person whose weight regulation happens to function properly, in which case I’d maintain a weight set point no matter what I did and no one should listen to me.

The ten principles of intuitive eating are as follows:

1. Reject the diet mentality (commit to never dieting again, and refuse to allow others to comment on what, when, or how much you eat or what your body looks like)
2. Honor your hunger (notice when you are becoming peckish and eat)
3. Make peace with food (allow yourself to eat anything that sounds appealing, without guilt)
4. Challenge the food police (replace negative self-talk about food, your body, or your diet with positive self-talk)
5. Feel your fullness (notice when you are moderately full, and stop eating; don’t feel like you have to finish everything on your plate)
6. Discover the satisfaction factor (eat pleasurable food; if you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you do love it, savor it)
7. Cope with your emotions without food (develop ways of self-soothing and distraction that don’t involve eating)
8. Respect your body (don’t insult your appearance; accept your body; stop weighing yourself; buy flattering clothes; allow yourself to be touched)
9. Exercise (find a way to exercise that is fun and feels good; build opportunities for activity into your everyday life; include strength training and stretching)
10. Honor your health with gentle nutrition (practice variety, moderation, and balance in your eating; eat whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and dairy; eat protein, carbohydrates, and fat; drink enough water; incorporate play foods into your eating, allowing some of your eating to be for health and some for physical pleasure)

Raising A Healthy, Happy Eater: A Stage-by-Stage Guide To Setting Your Child On The Path To Adventurous Eating: Basically the same thing as Ellyn Satter’s Child of Mine, and I honestly recommend that book instead. However, the authors do provide some interesting advice about causes of pickiness. Some toddler picky eating is caused by the child being incorrectly positioned in a high chair. Really look at how your child is sitting and imagine how much your muscles would be straining, and if it looks at all uncomfortable change it. Some picky eating is caused by poor development of gross, fine, and oral motor skills or of the sensory systems. To fix it, offer opportunities to develop those skills.

[The next review is about the Red Pill.]

Saving a Low Sex Marriage: A Man’s Guide To Dread, Seduction, and the Long Game: I spent six dollars on this book and honestly I think it was the most entertained I’ve ever been for six dollars.

This book can be roughly summarized as Horrible Rapey Misogynist Gives Reasonable Marriage Advice. It honestly gives me whiplash. There’s actually a lot of good stuff here! One page explains that you should accept “nos” gracefully and if you whine about how your partner won’t fuck you then they’re unlikely to want to fuck you. The next page declares that men get literally nothing out of marriage unless they are allowed to fuck their wives regardless of their wives’ opinion on the matter, and that it is evil man-hating feminism that men are no longer allowed to rape their wives. One page informs you of the startling redpill truth that your wife is more likely to want to fuck you senseless if you lift weights, dress well, and have your shit together socially, financially, and parentally. The next page explains that this is because you are scaring your wife into thinking you might leave her, because literally the only reason a well-dressed fit man who has his shit together is sexy is that someone else might fuck him. Also, preselection only works on women, because they are Mysterious Incomprehensible Woman Creatures. Please ignore the entire industry of advertising.

It is correctly pointed out that if you have set a boundary, and your partner continues to ignore your boundary, then the next step is to spend more time away from them and pay less attention to them, while continuing to be affectionate and interested in their lives. Then the author says that literally the only boundary you should bother to do this for is a “hard no” for sex (basically, a “no” that means your wife doesn’t want to have sex with you, rather than a “no” which means that she does but the circumstances aren’t right). You should not do that for things like your wife yelling at you, insulting you, or being disrespectful. (“My wife has to want to have sex with me” is not even a real boundary. You can’t set boundaries about other people’s sexual desires! Aaaaagh.)

One thing which is actually a useful concept from this book is the idea of covert contracts. Basically, a covert contract is when you make up a contract with another person inside your head: “if I do the dishes then you’ll fuck me,” “if I help you move then you’ll help me move,” “if I do something that makes me miserable then you’ll be proud of me,” “if I never disagree with you then you won’t ever be mad at me.” The other person only fulfills their end of these contracts by chance, because (a) they have no fucking idea that this contract even exists and (b) you gave them no chance to say “hey, wait, I don’t agree to this deal.” Instead, you should only do nice things you actually want to do for their own sake, and if you doing something is conditional on other people doing something you should make that clear to them. I think this is a super-useful idea which should be rescued from Misogynyland.

I do think it is probably true that many cases of someone’s partner no longer fucking them without any sort of explanation are caused by that partner becoming unattractive, and that marriage counselling is uniquely awful at addressing this situation, because it’s considered rude to admit you kind of find your husband ugly. Not sure what a good solution is.

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.

 

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.