I’m not going to cite a bunch of papers because I’m choosing between (1) writing something fast or (2) not at all, but my current posteriors on the causes of adult intelligence load non-trivially on genetics, but to the degree that parents control how smart their kid grows up to be, almost all of those effects for “the kinds of parents who could adopt kids with that level of parenting” (and aren’t alcoholics, or effectively illiterate, or moderately neglectful, or giving them apple juice instead of milk every day...) the influence seem to route through raw brain health due to good nutrition and low disease burden, especially under the age of 6?
Basically, my central mechanistic posterior is that the brain is really GROWING and establishing itself when you’re 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
If your body doesn’t get high protein levels or is wasting energy fighting off diseases, then the brain establishes itself less well, in ways that will echo through all future decades.
This is why (according to the posteriors in my brain, and no particular studies I’m going to look up) schooling prior to kindergarten hurts adult IQ in children whose parents are rich and could care for them very well.
And it is why schooling somewhat helps in children whose parents don’t read to them, don’t have middle class culture to transmit to them, and who might not even be feeding them adequately…
Exposure to “decent care from civilized people” AND DISEASES FROM PEERS can be a real net help for a 36 month old child who gets decent orderly care from nowhere other than government funded minding by non-family (even if the 36 month old will be near a bunch of other kids, and get sick from that, and get very slight brain damage from the sickness).
Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses.
Reading this, I was surprised that people were tracking the single biggest mechanistically controllable variable because normally people aren’t tracking evidence or reason or their goals or what the best way to get what they want is!
Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not.
One mother strongly advised me never to send my baby to daycare. She regretted sending her (normal and healthy) first son to daycare when he was one—he ended up hospitalized with severe pneumonia after a few months of constant illnesses and infections. She told me that after that she didn’t send her other kids to daycare and they had much healthier childhoods.
This was a second surprise, but it ameliorated the first surprise. Initially I thought that people had actually read the papers I had, and come to the same conclusions, but here it sounds like they are just having their noses rubbed into the mechanism of disease burden over and over and over and telling stories about it...
...which is a very valid way to make local sense of your local world! <3
Basically, my posteriors here are that the effect sizes (exposure to an diseases vs conscientious adults) go in different directions and ~~balance out for kids with bad parents (and they can actually be net positive for very bad parents).
Whereas if the parents are good, the adult IQ is higher if they skip school until they are five or six years old and their brain is sort of done with most of the core biological developmental steps (they’re passing mirror tests, passing sally anne tests, seriating, and so on).
The effects on raw brain health and later adult IQ consequences aren’t enormous either way...
And in that case the rough prescription I would offer is that good parents should keep the kids home if they can (or at least choose the daycare that keeps statistics on child diseases, isolates sick kids, brags about the low disease burden, and generally has decent “public health” practices) and bad parents should sent them to state subsidized daycare for better food and some structure in their life even if the diseases DO cause (very mild) brain damage.
I’m not going to cite a bunch of papers because I’m choosing between (1) writing something fast or (2) not at all, but my current posteriors on the causes of adult intelligence load non-trivially on genetics, but to the degree that parents control how smart their kid grows up to be, almost all of those effects for “the kinds of parents who could adopt kids with that level of parenting” (and aren’t alcoholics, or effectively illiterate, or moderately neglectful, or giving them apple juice instead of milk every day...) the influence seem to route through raw brain health due to good nutrition and low disease burden, especially under the age of 6?
Basically, my central mechanistic posterior is that the brain is really GROWING and establishing itself when you’re 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
If your body doesn’t get high protein levels or is wasting energy fighting off diseases, then the brain establishes itself less well, in ways that will echo through all future decades.
This is why (according to the posteriors in my brain, and no particular studies I’m going to look up) schooling prior to kindergarten hurts adult IQ in children whose parents are rich and could care for them very well.
And it is why schooling somewhat helps in children whose parents don’t read to them, don’t have middle class culture to transmit to them, and who might not even be feeding them adequately…
Exposure to “decent care from civilized people” AND DISEASES FROM PEERS can be a real net help for a 36 month old child who gets decent orderly care from nowhere other than government funded minding by non-family (even if the 36 month old will be near a bunch of other kids, and get sick from that, and get very slight brain damage from the sickness).
Reading this, I was surprised that people were tracking the single biggest mechanistically controllable variable because normally people aren’t tracking evidence or reason or their goals or what the best way to get what they want is!
This was a second surprise, but it ameliorated the first surprise. Initially I thought that people had actually read the papers I had, and come to the same conclusions, but here it sounds like they are just having their noses rubbed into the mechanism of disease burden over and over and over and telling stories about it...
...which is a very valid way to make local sense of your local world! <3
Basically, my posteriors here are that the effect sizes (exposure to an diseases vs conscientious adults) go in different directions and ~~balance out for kids with bad parents (and they can actually be net positive for very bad parents).
Whereas if the parents are good, the adult IQ is higher if they skip school until they are five or six years old and their brain is sort of done with most of the core biological developmental steps (they’re passing mirror tests, passing sally anne tests, seriating, and so on).
The effects on raw brain health and later adult IQ consequences aren’t enormous either way...
But since IQ has broad consequences across many areas of life… maybe optimize for that?
And in that case the rough prescription I would offer is that good parents should keep the kids home if they can (or at least choose the daycare that keeps statistics on child diseases, isolates sick kids, brags about the low disease burden, and generally has decent “public health” practices) and bad parents should sent them to state subsidized daycare for better food and some structure in their life even if the diseases DO cause (very mild) brain damage.